UbiquitySlideshow specification Wiki page shock and horror

[Evan Dandrea]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 11:22 PM, Dylan McCall<dylanmccall at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Evan,

Hi Dylan.  I'm cross posting this to the Ubuntu Installer mailing list and the
Ubiquity Slideshow Team mailing list, as I'd like to include any interested
parties in this discussion.

> I just noticed something horrifying (and confusing) with the
> UbiquitySlideshow blueprint and specification.
>
> Basically, we have two wiki pages :o

Indeed, the Ubiquity Slideshow team seem to have taken the specification from
the 7.04 cycle and made edits from there, whereas I built on the one from the
9.04 cycle that we discussed at UDS Mountain View (which, confusingly, was the
same name for the 7.04 UDS).

Not a problem though, I think we can reasonably merge the specifications and
combine our efforts to make sure this happens in some form for Karmic.

I am however, concerned that rendering HTML might be a bit heavy for what we're
trying to accomplish.  Assuming we wanted to use python-webkit for this, we
would have to promote it to main.  I'm also concerned that we either have to
restrict designers to layout each slide to a rigid specification, or force them
to understand a specific set of HTML tags.

Also, out of my own curiosity, how do you plan on providing translation support?

At UDS Barcelona I had a discussion with Ted Gould of the Desktop Experience
team and the Inkscape project, and he mentioned that the Inkscape project is
able to provide translations in SVG by simply putting an underscore in the tag
name and processing the text before rendering.  It should be fairly
straightfoward to implement and we already have rsvg on the Ubuntu CDs.

I am not suggesting that we must implement it this way, though I do think it is
the better approach for the reasons outlined.  Still, I am open to the opinions
of others on this.

I also spoke with Gerry Carr, head of Platform Marketing at Canonical, at UDS
and he expressed interest in taking on the task of creating the messaging for
each slide.  This was a task that the Design and User Experience team had
originally wanted to take on in the 9.04 cycle, but they could not fit it on
their schedule and thus the specification was deferred.

Whatever we agree on, we'll have to act quickly as the deadline for
specifications to be approved is Friday.

So, thoughts?