Extension Guidelines

Extension Guidelines

This page exists to outline a set of criteria that extensions should conform to in order to minimise incompatibility between Google+ extensions (except where direct UI clashes occur).

This is in being drafted

Assumptions

Extensions may assume the following:

• All elements displayed in the G+ stream (whether native or injected) have:
  • the standard update element classes (.tf, .Ek and .Om at present) and
  • a unique ID with the form #update-[extension_id]-[post_id].

Expectations

Extensions should conform to the following expectations to ensure compatibility:

• All elements injected into the DOM should be identifiable via class selectors and/or IDs containing a recognisable extension specific prefix.
• All elements injected into the DOM which are not intended to modify or supplement existing elements (ie. stand-alone injection blocks) should be contained within a parent element with the same characteristic classes as its siblings.

Discussion

• It'd be nice for extensions to be able to traverse the DOM in a certain way which would be transparent to injected elements. Would this be doable via inverse jQuery (or better, native) selector matching (expect extensions to put a known selector in all injected container elements)? Matt
• Should injected stream elements have IDs with the form #updateinj-[ext_id]-[unique_id] (or something similar) so selector partial matching of "update-" and "updateinj" return the native posts and the injected posts respectively? Partial matching "update" would return all stream items. Matt