Re: Assuming app locale support from the manifest

Hi,
I think that the localisation scheme that you're proposing will not meet 
your requirements.
First of all, you can never be sure that the application was localised 
properly, regardless of the scheme you use. In your solution, you can 
only suspect that if the developer included strings for some locale, 
that locale is supported. This will not prevent the developer from 
localising only part of their content. Ultimately, the user experience 
of using an app is entirely on the developer.
However, you are right that we currently don't give the developer any 
means of expressing which locales are supported by their application. I 
think it would be useful to add a new field to the manifest that lists 
the available locales of the app's content.

There is a problem with putting this info in the manifest though - if a 
locale is added, the manifest will have to be updated, which will most 
probably trigger application update for users that already have it 
installed. An update like that would be of no value for users that 
already use the locale that they prefer.

/Janusz

On 2013-04-22 07:49, Wil Clouser wrote:
> 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 08:07:19 UTC