Re: "may ignore markup"

On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 10:20 AM, John Gregg <johnnyg@google.com> wrote:
>
>
> The reason it is written this way is to allow user agents to use
> external notification libraries -- interest in supporting that type of
> implementation is strong in the group. However different platform
> notification schemes don't all do the same thing with respect to
> markup.
>

I'd like to push the burden onto the UA to ensure that strings are displayed
literally (no markup), doing escaping as necessary if the underlying
platform library would otherwise interpret markup in the string. Otherwise,
if gmail wants to display a notification like "Mail from: Andrew Wilson <
atwilson@google.com>" there's no way for it to do it in a
platform-independent manner.

This means that developers would have no way of passing markup through to
the underlying platform library even if the library does support markup -
I'm actually OK with this restriction, because I view
http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-notifications-20110301/ as more of a
lowest-common-denominator API, and developers should use
http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/WebNotifications/publish/WebNotifications.htmlif
they want markup.


>
> For example, on Ubuntu, to quote from
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDevelopmentGuidelines:
>    Notify OSD also presents other text formatting (such as bold and
> underlining) as plain text.
>    For example, the text “<b>Please</b> read the <a
> href="http://example.com/relnote">release notes</a>.”
>    will appear as “Please read the release notes.”
>
> The main point is that authors should not depend on formatting through
> markup when using this API.  The group is also working on HTML-content
> notifications as a separate spec, where full markup would be
> supported.
>
>  -John
>
>