vietnamese language pack follow-up
For those of you who read the somewhat widespread coverage of the Vietnamese language pack add-on issue and came away wondering if Firefox was indeed infected with worms, demolishing city blocks underfoot, and stealing babies, I've posted a few responses to the common misunderstandings and misreportings around the issue over at the For the Record blog.
reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.
The only thing troubling me is how this passed review. The Addons reviewing guidelines state that language packs "should only include strings and not javascript". Clearly this either wasn't or isn't being checked. It might be a good time to throw some emergency effort into more automated checks, if that isn't happening already.
Posted by: Ben Basson | May 9, 2008 3:08 AM
It doesn't matter whether or not someone puts JS in a language pack. It should not be run in the first place. This design decision is about as stupid as ActiveX.
Posted by: ant | May 9, 2008 3:26 AM
I would think that if the reviewing guidelines for Langauage Packs say that they "should only include strings and not javascript", that needs to be changed as I would expect they would likely include preferences as, well to change menu fonts to ones that include the necessary glyphs for the language, default bidi direction, etc.
Posted by: Bill Gianopoulos | May 9, 2008 3:55 AM
Ant: As I understand it, the language packs on AMO are just extensions without any GUI components. They need to be made distinct entities, so that as you suggest, script just simply would not run in the first place.
However, things are still getting through review when they should not. This makes me wonder not just about this particular case, but what other policies aren't being enforced as stringently as they should be.
Posted by: Ben Basson | May 9, 2008 4:24 AM