Re: About dialog API

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 10:51:08PM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > I have looked around a bit for other about dialogs, and the KDE api for that
> > associates an optional URL (homepage or something), email address and a
> > comment
> > (area of work or something) with contributors mentioned in the about dialog.
> > I guess 
> > thats about anything one would ever want to add. So if we can come up with a
> > string format
> > which allows to 
> > 
> > a) get this information in
> > b) is easily parseable
> > c) lets us conveniently ignore some parts (e.g. the URL, since we can't
> > depend on gnome_url_show)
> > 
> > I have nothing against it.
> > 
> > One proposal would be to say URLs are not needed and  use something like
> > 
> > "name1 <email1>\n\tcomment1\n"
> > "name2 <email2>\n\tcomment2\n"
> > "name3 <email3>\n"
> > "name4\n\tcomment4\n"
> > 
> > which has the advantage that it can be directly dumped into the label and
> > yield reasonable results.
> 
> Sounds basically fine for me: 
>  
>  - It might be cleaner if the name and comment were separated by a single
>    \t rather than a \n\t? Or perhaps tabs aren't a good idea considering
>    that you might have a text field in a GUI builder. A ':' might be better.
> 
>    "name1 <email>: stuff that name1 did"

> One possibility would be to extend the parsing of the contributers list
> to allow division into sections with section names.
> 
> "* Coders\n"
> "Matthias Clasen\n"
> "* Artwork\n"
> "Garrett Lesage\n"

We have GMarkup why not use it and avoid the need to add yet another
string parser.  No need to get too fancy, just something like :
<contributor
    name="Matthias Clasen"
    email_address="foo"
    contribution_area="Coder">description</contributor>

Translators would not need to learn another string format, and you
get extensibility to add crack later.  Does intltool handle xml
strings embedded in C yet ?