Doug -
I did not mean to be HTML centric, apologies. I'm currently going
through a debate in my mind (scary thing) about whether allowing an
arbitrary mime type and content would be good or bad. My gut sense here
is that if the UA is capable of displaying it, we should allow it, and
it will be used or not used (with fallbacks provided) based on the
support of UAs, with more UAs evolving to support it as user demand
grows. Ideally we would provide multiple fallbacks, e.g. allow someone
to specify an ordered list in order of preference, e.g. text/html
representation followed by image/svg+xml followed by text/plain
(although perhaps text/plain is better left broken out, so that it's
more visible and people actually fill it in, as opposed to being some
option in a list of things you can provide).
e.g.
CreateInteractiveNotification(in DOMString text-fallback, [Optional] in
DOMString MimeType1, [Optional] in DOMString NotificationFormat1,
[Optional] in DOMString MimeType2, [Optional] NotificationFormat2, ...)
forgive my broken IDL, I'm sure there's a better way to express it, but
you get the idea.
At any rate, I'm not opposed to what you propose, just trying to think
out loud of how to best do that while still ensuring that a text
fallback is still reasonably simple (and obvious) to specify.
-Ian
Am 23. Februar 2010 10:24 schrieb Doug Schepers <schep...@w3.org
<mailto:schep...@w3.org>>:
Hi, Ian-
I generally agree with you, and certainly with your sentiment. Not
to go all SVG on you, but why "*HTMLNotification"? I understand
that HTML is really common, and that increasingly SVG can be used as
part of HTML, but there are lots of devices out there (TVs, mobiles,
set-top boxes) that use SVG rather than HTML, which would benefit
from these interactive notifications... shouldn't we define a more
generic "CreateWebNotification" and pass an optional MIME Type
parameter that defaults to "text/html" (or some similar mechanism)?
I strongly agree with the sentiment that we should design for the
future, in any case, and not limit ourselves to simple text
notifications.
Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, SVG and WebApps WGs
Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) wrote (on 2/23/10 1:06 PM):
This thread seems to have languished, and I'm trying to figure
out how
to move forward here.
My understanding, grossly simplified, of the current state of
the world
is this:
1. Some people have a desire to show HTML / interactive
notifications,
to support use cases like "remind me of this calendar event
again in 5
minutes" or "Answer this call / hang up this call."
2. Some people have a concern that the proposed way to achieve
1, namely
allowing HTML, will result in certain platform notification systems
(Growl, NotifyOSD etc) not to be used.
I will disclose my biases up front and say that I do believe the use
cases that 1) tries to support are important. (I want to be able to
interact with a calendar notification to say "remind me again"
or "take
me to the full details of the event," for instance). I also am
of the
belief regarding #2, being unable to find any actual data on how
many
users have and use growl, that the user base falls into roughly two
camps. There's the people who have gone out and downloaded Growl (or
another notification service) because they want everything
coalesced,
and then there's the people who don't really care, and if
mail.app wants
to tell them something vs their browser wants to tell them
something,
they don't really think much of it.
I think that initially, we can do a lot more for this second
group in
terms of functionality that we can provide, and would find it
unfortunate if we held up forward progress because of a current
implementation detail. If that functionality proves to be useful and
desired by a number of users, I believe that platforms like
Growl and
NotifyOSD will find a way to make it work. In the meantime though, I
think there are relatively simple things we can do to not leave
these
users in the dark.
1, for the CreateHTMLNotification call, we could still allow a text
version of the notification to be provided. If there's a significant
number of users whose platforms don't support HTML Notifications, I
think there's a reasonable chance that would be filled out. If
20% of
users didn't see images, alt= text would be more prevalent.
2. For the case where there is no text alternative provided by the
website for the HTML notification, the UA can make a best effort at
transforming the HTML notification to a text notification,
optionally
with whatever markup the UA provides for text notifications (bold,
links, etc). Obviously things may not be perfect and it would be
preferable if the author of the page provided a notification,
but the
world is not perfect.
3. Let the user decide which notification mechanism they prefer.
If the
user prefers HTML notifications, then they get whatever the UA
implements. If the user has an alternate notification provider they
prefer, then they live with the constraints of that notification
system,
but either way it's a tradeoff that the user can make. And yes,
in the
near term some of this may be prohibitive on mobile devices, but
so are
many things (try as they might, mobile browsers still aren't a
pleasure
to work with when it comes to viewing large complex sites or
sites that
use flash, etc).
I strongly believe that web applications are increasing in
number, in
scope, and are becoming an integral part of people's lives. As web
applications expand, I don't think it is unreasonable to believe
that
support for HTML in the platform (e.g. HTML in notification
providers)
will happen some day. It's not going to be immediate, and so I have
outlined some ideas that I hope may get us moving in the
meanwhile, but
I don't want us to fall victim to the argument of "well, right
now it's
hard so let's not do it."
My $0.02.
Am 12. Februar 2010 12:50 schrieb John Gregg <john...@google.com
<mailto:john...@google.com>
<mailto:john...@google.com <mailto:john...@google.com>>>:
On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:14 AM, Drew Wilson
<atwil...@google.com <mailto:atwil...@google.com>
<mailto:atwil...@google.com <mailto:atwil...@google.com>>> wrote:
On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 5:06 AM, Henri Sivonen
<hsivo...@iki.fi <mailto:hsivo...@iki.fi>
<mailto:hsivo...@iki.fi <mailto:hsivo...@iki.fi>>> wrote:
On Feb 11, 2010, at 16:07, Jeremy Orlow wrote:
> As has been brought up repeatedly, growl and the other
notification engines are used by a SMALL FRACTION of
all web
users. I suspect a fraction of a percent. Why are we
bending over backwards to make this system work on those
platforms?
More seriously though: Virtually every user of an
up-to-date
Ubuntu installation has the notification engine
installed.
As for Growl, the kind of users who install Growl are
presumably the kind of users who care about
notifications of
multiple concurrent things the most. Furthermore, it
seems
that notifications are becoming more a part of operating
system platfroms. For example, it looks like Windows
7 has a
system API for displaying notifications:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee330740%28VS.85%29.aspx
This is a useful data point. It does seem like the major
platforms are conforming to a simple icon + title + text
interface for ambient notifications. The microsoft API seems
more aligned with NotifyOSD (non-interactable
notifications with
a transient status tray icon provided to allow the user to
click). I suspect a UA on those platforms (NotifyOSD and
Microsoft) would display an icon with each notification
to give
the user the ability to register a click on and/or
dismiss the
notification.
> Are there other examples where we've dumbed down an API to
the least common denominator for a small fraction of
users?
Especially when there's no technical reason why these
providers could not be made more advanced (for example,
embed webkit to display fully functional notifications)?
It's not a given that it's an advancement in user
experience
terms not to force all ambient notifications into a
consistent form.
I think this is a reasonable point also. I also want to
reiterate that your distinction between ambient and
interactive
notifications is an interesting one - most of the system
notification frameworks are geared towards ambient
notifications
(it's why NotifyOSD does not support the DBUS "actions"
array,
I'm assuming). Their core use cases are things like "your
printer is out of paper", not "You have an incoming
voice call
from Bob. Answer the call? Yes/No".
I think the challenge here is framing our API in a way
to allow
developers to specify their intent (interactive vs ambient),
with more restrictions on ambient content. The current spec
makes one cut at this via "createNotification" vs
"createHTMLNotification", but it's not at all clear that HTML
notifications are intended to be interactive rather than
just
pretty versions of ambient notifications (hence, Jonas'
concern
that developers will just create HTML notifications when
what
they really want is an ambient notification).
In terms of how I wrote the current draft, HTML vs Text+Icon has
nothing to do with notifications being ambient or
persistent. It is
really just about the content of the notification. It would
completely acceptable to me to have HTML notifications which are
always ambient: they show up for a few seconds, then they go
away,
but if the user wants to interact with the dynamic content
during
those seconds it's possible.
The problem is that none of the popular ambient notification
providers support HTML, so the assumption is that HTML =
another new
window or HTML = mandatory acknowledgement. However that's not
necessarily true.
One solution is only to support ambient notifications
(which is
essentially the thrust of the "no HTML" argument), but
I'd be
opposed to any API that does not allow for interactive
notifications. I suppose that's a discussion for the
requirements thread, though :)
Nothing in the current draft spec requires a UA to make Web
Notifications of either type persistent - a UA which only
supports
ambient (self-closing) notifications could already be
conforming, as
long as clicks that do happen are passed back to the web page.
-John
--
