[Gossip-dev] Re: [Telepathy] GossipProtocol problems

[Mikael Hallendal]

Xavier Claessens wrote:
> Le mardi 17 octobre 2006 à 09:55 +0100, Martyn Russell a écrit :
>>> The point of the standard parameter names as defined in the spec is that
>>> you can ship translations for these and use them. If you don't know what
>>> a parameter is, it's not
>> I disagree here. It makes sense for the backend to state in friendly 
>> terms what the parameter is for because the backend knows better than 
>> the UI what it is for and for UIs implementing a generic interface it 
>> will just work (TM).
> 
> If translation and a short help text for each parameter is given by the
> UI we'll get different naming in each UI and duplicated work for
> translators. I think it really make sense to have it in the backend.

I think it makes sense to standardize the names and let the UI decide on
the user presented strings. The UI should know what they are anyway and
I don't personally believe in auto generated UIs. Of course it should be
clear to the UI implementors what the parameter is. It might also make
sense to have an optional "get user readable name" from Telepathy but I
don't think it should be required to use this string.

Someone implementing a hard core Jabber client might like to use names
as JID, Resource etc, old-ssl. While someone implementing a
multi-protocol client might aim to try to use the same name for these
whether it's Jabber or ICQ (ie. "Login name" instead of JID and UIN).

>>>> We also would need default/example parameters for usernames/ports, etc.
>>>> I think having no value is less informative and it doesn't harm to have
>>>> it. We also make use of the example username in the username field
>>>> (where it would apply on a per protocol basis of course) and select it
>>>> so that users have a clue as to the format of the username.
>>> Similar to above, you should probably just recognise which format of
>>> account names different protocols have, and show an example if you know it.
>> I agree and disagree here :)
>>
>> For somethings, it desn't really matter (like the port) I think. For 
>> things like "username" I think it is important to have a default value 
>> because otherwise it means new users to a protocol will not know the 
>> format to use for creating a new account. This sort of thing is helpful 
>> to the user and makes the UI much more friendly.
> 
> Maybe what we can do in gossip is to not use default values to set the
> value of parameters but instead keep this value separately as an example
> for the UI.

I don't think we need these to come from Telepathy. We can provide these
from the UI layer (or GossipProtocol implementation).

Cheers,
  Mikael Hallendal

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