On 3/01/2016 15:19, Jesper Kristensen wrote:
Creating a second add-on with a different extension ID will not fix
things, only make them worse. Now users have two en-us dictionaries to
choose from, with no information telling which one is better. All
existing users are stranded on the old version.
Clearly there is information on which one is "better".
Giuliano's version is from 2013, it gives no information of how it was
derived. My add-on gives exact details of which underlying data is used.
And from the description of your new add-on, it seems it is not
identical to the one shipped with en-US Firefox, so users of localized
Firefox still don't have that dictionary available.
My add-on is different from the en-US dictionary shipped with Mozilla
products, and it clearly states what the differences are.
Users of localised Firefox can search for a dictionary and will find it.
Giuliano's version is also different from the en-US dictionary shipped
with Mozilla products and no one knows what the differences are. It may
represent the Mozilla en-US dictionary from an earlier date.
Mozilla should officially maintain the en-US dictionary on
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/language-tools/, like Mozilla
officially maintains the language packs.
The language packs don't contain dictionaries. Links to dictionaries on
that page lead to add-ons maintained by third parties, who, as in the
case of Giuliano, may not keep their add-on up-to-date. Some languages
offer more than one dictionary which is totally confusing. For example,
German offers three links, two lead to dictionaries using the reformed
orthography. KaiRo explained to me personally why there need to be two.
As the only dictionary maintained by Mozilla, Mozilla's en-US dictionary
is a special case. I agree that Mozilla should make it available
somehow. Perhaps Giuliano's add-on could be "adopted" by Mozilla or
transferred to another willing contributor and kept in sync with the
currently released dictionary. Frankly, it's a 10 minute job every six
weeks to sync with the current Mozilla version.
My add-on uses the "large" SCOWL dataset (SCOWL size 70) and is an
alternative to Mozilla's en-US dictionary. It registers itself as
"en-US-large", so users can even use both at the same time. I created
the add-on because Giuliano's add-on is out-of-date and because
Mozilla's en-US dictionary has a number of problems (many invalid
entries, 6000 doubtful proper names, not rich enough due to 5670 words
removed in May 2015, no accented words). We're working on fixing some of
the problems, but Ehsan decided to use the "normal" SCOWL dataset (SCOWL
size 60) as base data which may still not be "rich" enough for some users.
There seem to be two approaches to spell checking: Some people believe
that "bigger is better", like myself and the maintainer of the (forked)
en-GB dictionary, Marco. Others believe that a restricted dictionary
will not mask spelling errors and is more useful. Ideally both versions
should be offered with a high level of quality, as SCOWL offers these
two sizes. I believe I made the first step with a "large" size while
we're still working on improving the "normal" size.
Jorg K.
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