Re: Notifications

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 3:03 PM, Drew Wilson <atwilson@google.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Robert O'Callahan <robert@ocallahan.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 11:10 AM, Drew Wilson <atwilson@google.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> One of the suggestions made previously on this thread was to coalesce
>>> createNotification() and createHTMLNotification() into a single API with an
>>> optional HTML parameter - this would allow UAs on systems with
>>> Growl/NotifyOSD to ignore the HTML parameter passed in, and only display the
>>> text + icon information through the appropriate system framework. This also
>>> addresses concerns expressed on WHATWG that platforms that don't support
>>> createHTMLNotification() would break the web because web applications would
>>> fail to check for the existence of HTML support before calling these APIs -
>>> UAs would always have a useful fallback.
>>
>> The problem with that is that authors who test with a system that supports
>> HTML notifications could easily provide the wrong non-HTML message, or no
>> message at all, and not notice. It also forces authors to say things twice.
>>
>
> Analogously, developers can (and do!) create pages that rely on javascript
> or images being enabled, which break if a UA does not support them. I would
> not use this as an argument against UAs supporting Javascript or images.

This has indeed lead to that any browser that wants to get a
significant user base, or wants to be able to browse a significant
part of the web has to implement a Javascript engine and the DOM.

The argument is that the same thing would happen here. Every browser
would have to implement support for HTML notifications. I.e. calling
it "optional" will likely only be true in theory after a while.

/ Jonas

Received on Wednesday, 10 February 2010 23:23:16 UTC