Re: Re: Thought about spellchecking with Tiki....
xavidp, the spellchecker for Firefox is an extension based on MySpell. MySpell ships with the Mozilla browser and Mozilla Thunderbird email client. It is also used in OpenOffice.org, although I'm not sure it is still in the 2.x build that was just released. Anyway, it is available for Firefox under the name Spellbound. I imagine under the standard Mozilla 1.1 license, although it may be LGPL as well, since that is how OOo is licensed.
On spellcheckers for web apps, I haven't really surveyed this area, although it is on my Todo list. We are going to be integrating several web apps including Tiki and we don't want to inflict more separate spellcheckers on our end users than we have to. So we will be looking for a server side solution. I know there are a few Java-based open source web app spellcheckers, but don't recall most of their names at the moment. One is WBOSS.
But Aspell probably has broader support than any other open source spellchecker, and certainly has more word lists available. See e.g., Kevin's Word List Page, maintained by the maintainer of Aspell. Aspell also has the advantage of missing fewer errors than other spellcheckers tested. It is the default spellchecker on several Linux distributions, although there is usually a choice between it and Ispell, an earlier Gnu project now replaced by Aspell. There is also a Windows port of Aspell. There is at least one web app spellchecker based on Aspell, Speller Pages. I have not tried it, but it looks from the screenshot that it gives users no option to add words to a custom word list.
Haven't you been involved in TikiDAV development? I haven't tried it, but I wonder if having your students do their editing in OOo via TikiDAV wouldn't give you the advantage of a solid spellchecker, plus reducing the number of interfaces they need to learn.
Hope this helps.