Re: Notification size

On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 11:18 AM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

> On Thu, 30 Sep 2010, John Gregg wrote:
> >
> > Some developers using Chrome notifications have said that they would like
> to
> > be able to control the size of the notification bubble from the
> application.
>
> We'd have to make sure you couldn't use this to cover the screen, or even
> a large part of it, so that if a site that is trusted to show
> notifications gets XSSed, it can't escalate into a wholesale phishing
> exercise.
>
> Also, we should consider how a large notification would work in a
> non-visual medium, e.g. an audio or braille browser or a screen reader. A
> large notification could be very disruptive, far more so than a short one.
> Also, the concept of width and height doesn't apply there, so we'd want to
> move that into a media-specific layer like CSS, rather than having it in
> the core media-independent API.
>
>
Thanks for the responses.  Thinking about this some more, I think we can
accomplish the goal without changing the spec at all (or only very
slightly).

When showing an HTML notification, the current spec gives the UA full
control over how big of a window to use.  (For example, Chrome fixes the
width and fits the height to the HTML content subject to a 300-pixel
maximum.)  Another algorithm would be: clamp to a maximum size, but if the
content would normally exceed that size, show some UI which would remove (or
toggle) the clamp when clicked.

Perhaps the spec should still say that an notification should never be shown
fullscreen due to Hixie's concern.

Leaving it up to the UA should also address the concerns about non-visual
media.

 -John