xkcd #37

Albeit famous exceptions exist in form of Wikis, the Web today is still mostly a read-only experience. This leaves the Web content consumer exposed to all sorts of typographic cruelties, such as representing the ellipsis character ’…’ with three single full stops “...”, incorrect usage of a normal space where a non-breaking space would be preferred and even omission of the Oxford comma... While fighting the cause, namely sloppy Web authors, is like a fight against wind mills and certainly impossible to realize on Web scale, fighting the symptoms is a realistic option. Using client-side work-arounds, the Web can actually be fixed one page at a time. With this extension, we show how via part-of-speech tagging and JavaScript DOM event listeners, the Web can be made a better place.

On a related note, this extension has the bad ass-feature of actually implementing xkcd #37: http://xkcd.com/37/ Yeah, for real

Read the accompanying scientific paper: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B9LlSNwL2H8YbkpsV0pLQnM2bXc