Say Goodbye To Speling Erors On Slashdot Once And For All

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

Say Goodbye To Speling Erors On Slashdot Once And For All
November 4, 2001

Mozilla has finally stumbled upon a reason for its
existence.  Earlier today the programming team behind the
kitchen-sink-disguised-as-a-web-browser  announced a brand
new killer feature dubbed "De-Taco-izer". When enabled,
this feature will automatically detect and correct all
spelling snubs, punctuation problems, grammar gaffes, and
annoying alliterations contained on a webpage.  

"This is going to make surfing the Web so much more
enjoyable," explained one Mozillian.  "This will
significantly reduce the number of redundant comments
posted to Slashdot about Taco Boy's twisted use of the
English language. Our projections indicate that the total
amount of bandwidth saved across the entire Internet should
drop by two or even three percent!"

De-Taco-izer includes a special "College English Professor
With An Attitude" mode which will highlight all of the
mistakes with red scribbles and then assign a letter grade
to the webpage. For instance, if Taco Boy uses "virii"
instead of "viruses", the De-Taco-izer will write an
annotation across the page saying, "I've seen warez d00dz
write with better mechanics than this!  D-"

The project leader behind De-Taco-izer hopes to extend the
auto-correction technology to other domains.  "We've
already got a demoronizer to eliminate non-standard
Microsoft characters," he said.  "But what we really need
is a  De-Marketing-izer to make corrections to commonly
abused phrases by marketing weasels.  For instance, a
'known issue' would become a 'stupid bug our programmers
didn't have time to fix because they were busy adding a
Dancing Start Menu'.  And 'dear valued customer' would be
silently replaced with 'dear supplicant who is about to get
screwed yet again'."

These new features could give Mozilla a desperately needed
fifth chance to succeed.  "Mozilla will become the de facto
choice for browsing Slashdot," said one zealot.  "With
De-Taco-izer, you won't get a headache every time you read
a movie review by Taco Boy."

Not everybody is convinced.  "Microsoft will just 'invent'
this idea next week and integrate the Word spell-checker
into Internet Explorer," said one naysayer.  "Users without
Word will be gently reminded every 3.2 minutes to go out
and buy Office XP (but only after they obtain a Passport). 
And of course Microsoft will patent this feature; Mozilla
should find itself at the wrong end of a lawsuit within the
next month or so."

Richard M. Stallman didn't seem too impressed with
De-Taco-izer either.  "How can something that claims to
correct spelling errors not change 'Linux' into
'GNU/Linux'?  What a joke!"

Rob Malda's high school English teacher was unavailable for
comment at press time.
--
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