any way for the web page itself to turn off spellcheck in iPad Safari?

My app is a full-text search interface for ancient texts. The input is always going to be an ancient word. iPad Safari insists on pointing out that it is not correctly spelled -- for modern English, which it ain't.

Chrome honors this, iPad Safa开发者_开发百科ri does not:

  <input type="text" spellcheck="false" >

Is there something analogous for Safari? I think the user can turn off spellcheck globally on the iPad but they shouldn't have to do so to work with my web-app.

 <RANT> 
   I'm getting pretty fed up with all of this "built-in so-called intelligence" which is based
   on a very narrow set of assumptions about what the user is actually doing with the browser. 
 </RANT>

As Hamlet says to Horatio:

 There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
 Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Found : autocorrect=off

It sounds as though the 'spellcheck' property was unsupported initially in Safari 3 (from the bug ticket http://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14552).

But it looks as though they fixed it in a subsequent version - I can see that it's working okay on my Desktop version 4.0.5.

My guess is that the iPad version of Safari isn't up to date enough for this fix, but I presume it will come soon!

Have you tried specifying the input language you're expecting?

<input type="text" lang="enm">

Enm is Middle English (1100-1500), or you could try ang which is Old English (ca. 450-1100). I'm expecting iPad doesn't have a dictionary for either, but you never know. Full list of tags is here, introduction to language tags here.