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>>:
On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:14 AM, Drew Wilson <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>> 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
