Reply To: Tip: Faster spell checking by skipping certain elements

[Derek Read]

There is a more graceful way coming in a future release (I expect it to be officially documented at some point in the Programmers Guide). An API will allow you to add arbitrary CSS as a string, essentially the equivalent of tacking a CSS @import statement onto the end of your files. This willl let you override other settings (standard CSS cascade rules should apply). Until then you have the best solution possible.

Concern about writing to the file system is valid however, regardless of what you are doing (as with your current solution) and XMetaL customizations that require manipulating files on the user's machine should take this into account (part of the reason for the API previously mentioned is because it will give you one less thing to worry about during deployment of customization files if you can simply pass strings of CSS in via script).

You've hit on another topic here though. We plan to implement various features for spell checking and one of those includes support for xml:lang. Given that support, it should then be possible (provided your DTD defines that attribute) to set xml:lang=”zxx” for an element to have our spell checker skip over it.

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