Comments on 22 June 2010 draft of Web Notifications

  Some high-level comments on the June 22 draft of Web Notifications:

* Section 1/2 - "alert" should be defined, especially its relationship 
to the 3 types of notifications defined in Section 1; (would it be 
possible to not even use that term in its noun form in this spec e.g. 
replace it with "{ambient,interactive,persistent} notification"?)

* Section 2, 1st req - I find this requirement a bit difficult to parse 
and that may be caused by it being more of a design goal than a 
specification requirement. I think part of the problem is the use of 
"implementation" at the beginning and "specification" at the end. For 
instance, to what does "implementation" refer?

* Section 2, 3rd req - seems like this should be "The specification must 
support ambient notifications" or is there some additional constraint 
you want to define; perhaps it would be useful to reword this as a 
positive "must" requirement rather than a "must not" requirement

* Section 2, 6th req - I find this requirement a bit difficult to parse 
and I think the problem is with the use of "implementation" in this 
context. From the perspective of a requirement for the spec, it appears 
the idea is the spec must support persistent notifications and an 
implementation, for what ever reason, may not actually support those 
types of notifications.

* Section 2, 4th UC - it seems like this is the same as the 1st UC (and 
if so, perhaps it should be deleted)

* Section 2, 5th UC - I don't quite understand this UC. Is this trying 
to build a dependency on Web Workers?

* Section 3.2, 2nd para - this text is prescriptive so why is it in a 
non-normative section?

* Section 4 - "security origin" should be defined

* Section 5 - sorry for my ignorance here but why is "Center" used in 
the name; it would be useful to expand a bit on what is meant by "simple 
notification" (e.g. contrast it with Web Notifications)

* Section 5 - what is the use case for PERMISSION_UNKOWN; not sure what 
"unless otherwise specified" means in this context

* Section 5 - createNotification says it returns a "text" notification 
objection and it's not clear what text means in this context.

* Section 7.1 - this info seems more like hints and as such, perhaps it 
should be non-normative

* Section 9 - perhaps this info and examples should be marked non-normative

BTW, do you have a guestimate on when you think this spec will be ready 
for a First Public Working Draft?

-Art Barstow

Received on Thursday, 16 September 2010 12:36:41 UTC