589801 - Format Problem with Email Notifications

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 665419

(Bugzilla :: Email Notifications, defect)

Description

[KitchM]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100724 Firefox/3.6.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100806 Lightning/1.0b2 Lanikai/3.1.2

The email notifications have a formatting problem that is hard to understand.  The email contains:
           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Blocks|                            |589098

Are the categories "What", "Removed" and "Added"?  If so, why isn't "What" at the left margin?  Could there be other categories?

Are the details "Blocks" and "589098"?  If so, what do they mean, and why isn't "Blocks" at the left margin as well?

Why not use complete sentences instead?  Space is not an issue.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Get email notification.
2.Read email.
3.
Actual Results:  
See above.

Expected Results:  
Better, more intuitive layout and text.

Comment 1

[Frédéric Buclin]

Spaces and complete sentences are an issue. Email notifications are pretty "technical" on purpose.

Comment 2

[KitchM]

Sorry, but you may have to explain that in more detail for us normal folk.  Why are spaces and complete sentences an issue?  Why would an email notification have anything to do with being "technical"?

Comment 3

[Frédéric Buclin]

(In reply to KitchM from comment #2)
> Why are spaces and complete sentences an issue?  Why would an email
> notification have anything to do with being "technical"?

Developers want to be able to parse an email at a glance, without having to read full sentences (some developers say short sentences would be fine, though, but there is no concensus here). Also, space matters because when you get many bugmails, you want to be able to have all the info in the same window, to avoid useless scrolling.

There is a lot of discussion going on already in bug 665419 and bug 607829, so duping to 665419 which is also about the format of the diff table.