[joshuat]

I find it odd that many of both the blog comments and the HN thread comments are focused on debating the merits of the feature itself rather than the broader point of the article, that a small isolated change made by one person can have a massive, long-lasting impact on software and on how billions of people interact with it for decades after it was implemented.

It’s like no one ever took a humanities class

[applfanboysbgon]

This isn't necessarily true. The fact that we're still using squiggles decades later means that nobody else has come up with a better idea. If there are no better ideas, if this is the best UI design for spellchecking there is, then it's simple enough that, if not for him, someone else would've came up with it. How many ways are there to highlight a word in a sentence, really, especially when your constraint is that the UI for highlighting the word must not overlap with actual ways normal people highlight words in sentences because the application supports that for non-spellchecking features (highlighted background, color change, non-squiggly underline, etc.).

[vintagedave]

> it's simple enough that, if not for him, someone else would've came up with it

The thing is, no-one else did. It's very easy to point to something being simple and obvious decades after it has become omnipresent.

Plus, someone has to be first. And he was first.

The core part of this is not the underline, or possibly even doing it asynchronously though on desktop software at the time that was more rare, but the squiggly underline. I strongly doubt squiggles are a choice anyone else may have made. A solid underline, school-teacher-style, maybe.

[snickerbockers]

>we're still using squiggles decades later

What in this context is "we"? I can name plenty of programs that accept textual input yet don't even spellcheck at all. The green squiggles are hardly ever even seen outside of word processors, for which it is practically mandatory to implement a 1:1 copy of the latest MS Word UI.

Evidently my browser uses red squiggles for what it believes to be spelling mistake because it just highlighted "UI" in my previous paragraph. That there is a chronic pandemic of terrible spelling in just about every online form of communication proves that the red squiggles are not effective at grabbing anybody's attention.

>If there are no better ideas

Counterpoint: 4% of the population cannot distinguish between red and green so at the very least I can say with confidence that using colors (especially those two colors in combination) is not a sufficiently effective way to distinguish between poor spelling and poor grammar. If it were up to me I'd replace one or both of them with some simple geometric shape such as an ellipse or a rectangle that encloses the word or phrase which is incorrect. The shape could still be colored to make it stand out to people who can distinguish between colors as long as the shape for grammar and the shape for spelling can be distinguished from one another without knowing what color they are.

Another good alternative is blinking like that old HTML tag. I don't know if there are any common disabilities which prevent people from easily discerning motion on a computer monitor (other than disabilities that inevitably apply to anything on the monitor, such as severe myopia or blindness) but blinking cursors are apparently acceptable so probably not.

[LtWorf]

So your teacher never underlined your homework with red or blue pencil? Doesn't seem a particularly original idea to me.