Proposal: Modify tags allowed in Activity Stream templates

[Evan Gilbert]

Current set is {<b>, <i>, <a>, <span>}, container is not obligated to respect any of these tags. Proposal is to add <em> for both title and body and add <br> and <p> for body.

Also want to clarify the requirements around supporting these HTML tags. Currently says that the container "has the option to strip out these [HTML] tags", should change to "has the option to strip out these tags or attributes of these tags".

Evan

[Arne Roomann-Kurrik]

Many browsers render <em> and <i> identically- the motivation to use em over i would be to improve the semantic markup of the content.  I support adding <em> but feel that we should also include <strong> for the same reason.

~Arne

--
OpenSocial IRC - irc://irc.freenode.net/opensocial

[Evan Gilbert]

This makes sense. + <strong> to the proposal.

[Amar Gandhi]

imo, titles are like email subjects and should be text only - no formatting. 

---

From: opensocial-an...@googlegroups.com [mailto:opensocial-an...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Evan Gilbert
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2008 12:22 PM
To: opensocial-an...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Proposal: Modify tags allowed in Activity Stream templates

[Marco]

We should remove the <span> attribute. Especially if the container
want to strip the style attribute to enforce a container enforced look
and feel.
Is there any good use case for the <span> ?

On Apr 18, 3:09 pm, "Amar Gandhi" <am...@google.com> wrote:
> imo, titles are like email subjects and should be text only - no formatting.
>
> _____
>

[Evan Gilbert]

The use case I was thinking for <span> was <span style="font-color: teal">, for the containers that might want to allow custom styling in activities. However, unless any container thinks this is useful we should probably take it out of titles.

So, updated proposal is to add <em> for both title and body, <br> and <p> for body, and remove <span> for title.

To Amar's point about text only - containers have the option to strip any style. <a> tags are probably the only tag that are likely to show up in most containers, and even these might be limited to links to the current site. However I think it is useful to allow for <b> and similar hints if the container might find them useful.

[Reinoud Elhorst]

I might want to add some difficulty to this discussion. I actually planned to hold any discussion on this issue until I had thought about it a little longer, and propose it for 0.9, but I just want to mention it.

At Hyves we have always supported our own markup language, using ubb-like codes ([b] [i]), and custom smilies.
Now obviously this is not a problem for the gadget developer, except that quite some users use these tags in their nicknames, and nicknames are the primary display name for Hyves users.

As I said, we're still thinking on how to implement this correctly into OpenSocial (and I don't want to hijack this thread by starting that discussion), however I just wanted to mention it.

[Arne Roomann-Kurrik (Google)]

+1 for the proposal to add <em> (and <strong>!) for both title and

body, <br> and <p>
for body, and remove <span> for title.

Reinoud, would it be possible for Hyves to rewrite these tags into
their HTML equivalents when rendering an activity stream entry?

~Arne

[Cassie]

Reinoud - just wanted to clarify your thoughts on this proposal. Was your comment a +1 or -1?
Everyone else - we just need a couple more opinions for this simple change :)

Thanks.
- Cassie

[Reinoud Elhorst]

I suppose it's a +0 from me, I just wanted to share our markup problems that we're probably going to shre seriously for the 0.9 spec.

Honestly, I don't really care. It seems that <em> and <strong> are logical, although unnecessary additions (since <i> and <b> will do the same job, and take less space in the database).

At Hyves we don't have a activity stream body. We do have some places where we don't allow newlines in user generated content; I can see how containers would not want newlines at some places. Containers are free to strip out newlines though. In this case I would think that <br> is a useful addition, <p> seems less so, since most people use it as an alias for <br> anyways.

[do...@google.com]

Okay, so why don't we just do the same thing that we did with the
title and body fields on message objects. ie we rephrase all this
tagging stuff to just say this:

"HTML attributes are allowed and but may be sanitized or stripped by
the container."

(I don't think its likely all containers will ever agree before I have
to close 0.8 on which styles are fine or not fine :)

Thanks.
- Cassie

[Cassie]

Due to lack of feedback and positive consensus I'd like to close this thread for 0.8.
Don't worry though, we can still address this in 0.9

Thanks.
- Cassie