Re: Notification types

On Thu, 28 Oct 2010, John Gregg wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 2:45 PM, Simon Dittlmann <simon.dittlmann@googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Has the concept of notification types/priorities been discussed? It 
> > seems to be a common feature in existing notification APIs to have 
> > either a priority system or a category system or both. This has a number 
> > of benefits for the user; for example they can set a filter on the 
> > notification priority at some level on a system-wide basis or the 
> > display can format the priority as appropriate for the notification type.
> 
> I agree with you. Thereby you can differentiate between notifications from applications (you've got email) and from devices (your pri
> nter is out of paper). Furthermore with a priority system it would be possible that a fire detector notification is more important th
> an an email notification.

Right, this is the main use case; allowing the notifications to either be 
filtered based on type, or allowing different formatting for different 
types.

> 
> > The obvious way to expose this sort of thing in the API would be a set 
> > of named constants for different types and an extra, optional, argument 
> > to the notification constructor (or factory function) for the type constant.
> IMHO a factory function is a good idea.
> 
> 
> If priority is part of the notification construction API, we would be relying on each application to correctly declare its own
> priority.  It is desirable that a "something is on fire" notification would get priority to "new email", and maybe I'm being cynical,
> but won't all applications eventually set the priority to maximum to avoid being filtered out?

Does that happen in desktop systems that use the corresponding features in 
libnotify or growl? If not, why should it be espected to happen with 
web-apps? It seems that if an application was that user-hostile people 
might disable noifications from it altogether.

> A system which gives users control over the priorities of various notification sources seems better -- perhaps it could be
> incorporated into the permissions interface?

That seems rather complex. Given, say, a web page that provided both email 
and calander functions, and wanted to provide notifications at different 
priority levels for mail vs canendar events, how would one distingush 
between those at the point when one was granting permissions?