Re: Thoughts on WebNotification

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 1:29 PM, Doug Turner <doug.turner@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey Drew,
>
> > I think this is too vague, as it's sounds like a user agent could *not*
> ignore markup in the string, and still be compliant with the spec. I think
> we need to be very explicit that the string *must* be treated as plain text.
> So if I pass in "&gt;<b>foo</b>" as the body parameter to
> createNotification(), the resulting notification must display the string
> "&gt;<b>foo</b>", without stripping or converting any of the substrings that
> might look like HTML entities.
> >
>
> Yup.  we should tighten up the language.  i think we are on the same page
> here.
>

It's actually more complicated given the various platform behavior.  While
Growl doesn't interpret markup, NotifyOSD on linux does allow some markup in
its notifications (&lt; shows <, for example) [1, section 5].  So it's not
sufficient to just pass the string directly, it has to be escaped in order
to present the exact text provided.

So perhaps, "the user agent must display the string as plain text, without
interpreting markup; if using a notification platform which does interpret
markup, the user agent should modify the string so that any markup is shown
rather than interpreted."

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDevelopmentGuidelines