[Chandler-dev] is a unified displayName a good thing?

[Ted Leung]

This topic came up for discussion in today's platform meeting (Alec  
also joined us)

Here's where we seem to be:

We seem to have agreement that a 'title' attribute which would not be  
localized (but would be indexed) is necessary

After that things get fuzzy, due mostly to i18n concerns.   The big  
place where this has impact is places in the UI where "displayName"  
data appears - table column headers, detail view field labels, menus  
and so forth.    We also have a problem related to the ability to  
switch locales because we currently store the localized version of  
the strings in the displayName.   There seem to be a lot of issues  
left to tackle here and we aren't going to try to tackle them for  
alpha2.    Some of the possible solutions that we discussed included

1. ripping out displayName altogether and seeing what we actually needed
2. introducing a different attribute and placing that attribute only  
on items whose names actually show through to the UI.

We are not going to try doing either of these for alpha2 but we will  
need to tackle them for i18n reasons, if for no other.   There's also  
some uncertainty on the exact level of i18n functionality that we are  
targetting for 0.7 and ultimately 1.0.

For alpha2, that leaves the introduction of a 'title' attribute on  
ContentItem as the only active work item.

Does that sound accurate to people that were in the meeting?

Is there any additional comment?   If there is not, I am going to  
start looking at adding a 'title' attribute to ContentItem.

Ted

On Apr 18, 2006, at 12:24 PM, Brian Kirsch wrote:

> >>> So is the rule to display the title in preference to the   
> displayName?   It seems to me that the only time that displayName  
> is  really that >>> useful is when the item being displayed is an  
> attribute  name -- I can imagine localizing that data, I can't  
> imagine  localizing data
> >>> entered by the user.    I guess you could have a  displayName  
> that was "Untitled foobar", which might make some sense  to  
> localize, >>> except that when display a summary view full of  
> untitled  items, you' just see a pile of "Untitled foobar" rows.
>
> I have always been a strong advocate of reworking the displayName.  
> However, perhaps we should have a brief meeting or IRC chat to  
> hammer out the specifics of the change. I want to make sure that  
> adding the addition attribute 'title' really does meet our  
> localiztion needs.
>
> For example, in previous iterations of adding title with  
> displayName the title was going to be the localized field and  
> displayName the system field. Having displayName be the localized  
> field is fine I just want to make sure everyone is on the same page  
> and that we consider the edge cases for localization such as the  
> 'Untitled Folder' example Ted gave.
>
>
> --Brian
>
> Brian Kirsch -  Cosmo Developer / Chandler Internationalization  
> Engineer
> Open Source Applications Foundation
> 543 Howard St. 5th Floor
> San Francisco, CA 94105
> http://www.osafoundation.org
>
>
>
> Ted Leung wrote:
>
>>
>> On Apr 17, 2006, at 9:49 AM, Katie Capps Parlante wrote:
>>
>>> Ted Leung wrote:
>>>
>>>> If you look at Bug 1745: <https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/  
>>>> show_bug.cgi?id=1745>, you'll see that there's another issue   
>>>> related to displayName /  title, which is localization.   I  
>>>> think  that the localization stuff points to a separate Title  
>>>> attribute  rather than displayName.   I suppose that you could  
>>>> even argue  that the two names (title and displayName) are  
>>>> reversed in their  meanings if you have both of them - title  
>>>> being the "system" name  for the item and 'displayName' being  
>>>> the text that is localized,  indexed, and  presented to the user.
>>>
>>>
>>> Hi Ted,
>>>
>>> I don't think your description above is exactly right. The way I   
>>> see it, a "two different attributes" proposal should look  
>>> something  like this:
>>>
>>> - Title
>>>    - typically data entered by the user (e.g. title of an event)
>>>    - not localized
>>>    - indexed, this is the attribute you want in end user searches
>>>
>>> - Display Name
>>>    - system name
>>>    - typically created by parcels: blocks, events, schema items,  
>>> etc.
>>>    - localized (shows up in columns and other display elements)
>>>    - not indexed, or indexed separately
>>>
>>> The motivator behind having one "displayName" or  
>>> "displayAttribute"  was a requirement that *any* item should be  
>>> able to show up in a  table and have some reasonable "display  
>>> name". I think we can find  a way to meet this requirement some  
>>> other way -- the localization  and index issues are clearly more  
>>> important requirements. Right now  we have no requirement to  
>>> display blocks in tables, for example.
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> +1 for two different attributes btw.
>>
>>
>> I know Alec was working on a writeup on this topic as well.   
>> Alec,  I'd be curious to know if Katie's ideas match up with  
>> yours?   If  this is going to get into alpha2, we are going to  
>> need to come to  agreement fairly soon.
>>
>> Ted
>>
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>

----
Ted Leung                 Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF)