Re: Moving alerting methods to DAP (was: Re: [widgets] Draft Minutes from 13 August 2009 Voice Conf)

On Aug 24, 2009, at 20:19 , Arve Bersvendsen wrote:
> This is a purity-above-all argument, really, hence "think" instead  
> of "does not belong in DAP".  Alerting methods are in no way device- 
> specific or device-bound. Nor are they particularily specific to  
> widgets (or HTML5, for that matter).

I think you might be reading a little bit too much into the name. In  
some ways, the "device" is anything that sits below the browser, which  
could possibly be called "system" or "platform". For instance there's  
a file system API but nothing requires that the physical storage be on  
the device itself. In fact, none of the planned APIs do: the Camera  
API could be used to capture images from a thousand remote sensors so  
long as there was a way to expose them as part of the system. We could  
count go philosophical here to draw boundaries but it probably  
wouldn't help much.

The reason I think that these methods have room inside DAP is because  
notification and attention-getting tend to be coherent system-wide  
(e.g. bouncing the icon, having a list of notified events first thing  
on-screen when the device is opened, etc.). They equally well take  
control of your cat's brain to have it bite your toes and print out  
ticker tape notifications above your bed. It's a system thing that  
needs to be exposed in a system-independent way.

I don't feel that strongly about it, but there's also the fast that  
it's actually listed as being in DAP's charter ;-)

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/

Received on Tuesday, 25 August 2009 10:49:00 UTC