[AppStream] Additional markup support in descriptions

[Matthias Klumpp]

Am So., 28. Juli 2019 um 20:29 Uhr schrieb Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com>:
>
> On Sun, 28 Jul 2019 at 07:47, Robert Ancell <robert.ancell at canonical.com> wrote:
> > I guess that would mean supporting both <code> and <pre>.
>
> I think various things would break trying to support <pre> -- a lot of
> current and legacy tools that import and export AppStream assume that
> XML whitespace isn't important. My vote would be to add <code>, <em>
> and <strong> and leave it at that.

The reason why I was asking about whether <code/> meant a code-block
or a single-line markup was more about the intent of Robert for how
this should be used. Diverging from HTML makes not much sense, as that
would yield unexpected results. Aligning with Mallard or Docbook XML
is the one thing that could also make sense (but not inventing our own
stuff).

+1 from me for <code/> and <em/> as they were discussed here (I
already have a commit to add <em/>, but libappstream currently has a
bunch of validator changes staged that I want to land first). I am
unsure about <strong/> (wouldn't that just be visual clutter?) and
especially about code blocks. The thing I want to avoid is the
description texts becoming manual pages or detailed instructions with
code examples, as README.md files often are. Allowing code blocks may
make it more likely that descriptions will become instructions.

Cheers,
     Matthias

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