Re: Thoughts on WebNotification

On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 8:50 AM, Doug Turner <doug.turner@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Jun 25, 2010, at 8:39 AM, John Gregg wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > 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
>
>
> From an implementation pov, this text sorta scares me.  Figuring out which
> notification platform interpret which character sequences sounds hard.  And
> these system are not static and must be reevaluated constantly.
>
> I think it might make it a bunch easier to simply say that UA should strip
> out any escape sequences or html tags.
>
> What do you think?


I'm concerned that it would make it impossible to display a certain category
of strings in notifications.  Suppose we're both web devs, I'm chatting with
you and want to share with you a snippet of code; will the chat notification
be blank?

I agree with the problem of depending on the providers, but if we do want to
be able to specify dependable output for input (my interpretation of this
discussion), I think we have to make some sort of effort there.

 -John

 -John