Re: Assuming app locale support from the manifest

Hi Wil,  
Sorry for the delay in replying!  

On Monday, April 22, 2013 at 6:49 AM, 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.

That is correct. There are good client/server libraries out there for doing content-based localization.   
> 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.

Ok, but I feel this should really be enforced at the store level. Like, your app reviewers should tell people not to do this (or warn users that the app might not be fully localized)… or some combination of that. There is just no technical solution that I can see here :( Like you said below, it won't scale.  

(Janusz gave a good summary to this)
> 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.

I'm totally ok with adding a note to this effect if you think it will help.  
> 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?
I'm ok with the inclusion of that text. Mounir created a bug you can track:

https://github.com/sysapps/manifest/issues/18

Received on Thursday, 25 April 2013 16:46:30 UTC