Ispell and HTML Documents

commandline

I’m posting this for my own benefit as much as anyone else’s. Ispell has some support for HTML / XML documents, if invoked with ‘-h’ it will not spell-check certain parts of the document as the rules below show:

  • This element name is misspelled: <elemment>element</elemment>
  • This attribute name is incorrect: <tag nme="Dean" />
  • The value of this attribute is wrong: <tag animal="Elepant" />

Of the three lines above none get kicked out as errors. The moral of this story is that if you use ispell in mark-up mode then you’ll get fewer false positives at the risk of letting more mistakes slip through.