Assuming app locale support from the manifest

Hi,

The Firefox Marketplace team has been improving its language support on
the site and have come across a question regarding app locale support.
There are two areas to consider:

     1) Localization of the app metadata (the name, description, etc.) and
     2) localization of the application itself (the UI in the app, the
data it shows, etc.).

App manifests currently support an optional 'locales' field[1] allowing
developers to address #1 easily.  However, I haven't seen any 
consideration for #2, telling end users about L10n inside the app itself.

In an effort to minimize the work for developers, we'd like to suggest a
change to the meaning of the 'locales' field in the manifest from it's
current implication of "Here is a translation of metadata for my
application in a locale." to "Here is a translation of metadata for my
application *and* my application itself is localized for this locale."
Revealing this information in the manifest provides much needed
information for a consumer.  It's a poor user experience to see an app
localized in a marketplace, buy the app, and after installing see that
the app merely provided a translated description but no other content.

Proactively enforcing this policy won't scale (if for no other reason
than defining what it means for an app to be localized) but strongly
recommending it in the spec will guide the majority of developers and
allow marketplaces to make decisions based on that.  For example, adding
filters to a search to show only localized apps for a language.

A suggestion for text to add to the locales section in the manifest spec:

 > By adding a locale key to the locales field you are declaring that
 > your app is localized for that locale and will perform in a reasonable
 > fashion for clients using that locale.

Thoughts?

Wil

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Apps/Manifest#locales

Received on Tuesday, 23 April 2013 05:48:51 UTC