Thunderbird Grammar Checker 0.5 is released

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/14781/

Now it's compatible with Thunderbird 3.x. The language for checking is correlated with the Spell Checker language. Sorry for delay, but my work load can't give me enough time to support it well.

Future plans:
  • Support inline highlighting. Backend is almost ready, but there are some problems with frontend - I just don't know how to properly modify DOM of the opened message compose window. Looks like I have to use/hook some JS-events, but my current research gives nothing.
  • Move to After The Deadline server instead of LT server-mode. LT is integrated to AtD server (see the News section on http://www.languagetool.org/). However, there is a problem with the current AtD server - it doesn't work locally now: http://openatd.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/217. Until they fix the problem, I can't recommend to use it.
  • Implement pure JS-based Grammar Checker engine. See below the notes.
All of these require some time and efforts, and I gladly accept all the help for contributing in this addon.

An example of LanguageTool rule:
<rule>
    <pattern mark_to="-1">
        <token postag="SENT_START"></token>
        <token>this</token>
        <token regexp="yes">are|were</token>
    </pattern>
    <message>Did you mean <suggestion>these</suggestion>?</message>
    <short>Grammatical problem</short>
    <example type="correct">These are errors.</example>
    <example correction="These" type="incorrect"><marker>This</marker> are errors.</example>
</rule>

As you can see, it is required to support XML parsing, regular expressions and FSM capabilities. All of these can be done in JavaScript, so it's matter only of time and efforts to create pure JS-based engine. As soon as it is implemented, all the dependencies from LT or AtD can be removed.

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