703716 - describe whitespace meaning in description and name

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core Graveyard :: DOM: Apps, defect)

Description

[Ian Bicking (:ianbicking)]

From: https://github.com/mozilla/openwebapps/issues/6

Right now the description is just "human readable", but there's no indication about how newlines or multiple spaces should be handled.

I recommend:

    The name is a single-line, and all whitespace is normalized to one space (i.e., newlines are equivalent to a space).
    The description can contain newlines and whitespace, and both are preserved when displayed. That means in the HTML case that newlines are replaced with <br> and multiple spaces use &nbsp;. This allows, for example, simple indented lists.

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from Lloyd:

I like your proposal for name, but think we should do the same for description. My thinking is that if you support overly simple markup, you constrain the display of information without providing any real expressive power. I think we should say description is a chunk of unbroken prose, and in doing so we give a lil' bit more structure and freedom to the folks designing the UA integration.

just a hunch.

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from Ian:

Android apps, from what I can tell, have a screenshot and a plaintext description. The description is frequently more than one paragraph, and includes bullet points. This seems reasonable to me.

Comment 1

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

Is this a mozapps api bug? If so, migrate this bug to Core --> DOM/Mozilla Extensions.

Comment 2

[Ian Bicking (:ianbicking)]

It's a matter of specification; the mozApps API doesn't actually do anything with the description, but the marketplace and dashboard do, and neither has guidance on how to interpret whitespace in the description.

Comment 3

[Sylvestre Ledru [:Sylvestre]]

Core Graveyard / DOM: Apps is inactive. Closing all bugs in this component.