- From: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:24:31 -0800
- To: Drew Wilson <atwilson@google.com>
- Cc: robert@ocallahan.org, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>, John Gregg <johnnyg@google.com>, Olli@pettay.fi, public-webapps <public-webapps@w3.org>
On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 6:29 PM, Drew Wilson <atwilson@google.com> wrote: > > On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 5:49 PM, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote: >> >> >> And I think the answer is "yes". Any time someone talks about an >> optional web feature I get nervous. Can you give any examples of >> successful optional web features that exist today? >> > > I'd suggest Javascript and Images, but you've rejected them because you > don't think they are examples of successful optional features (meaning that > browsers that don't support them are not equally compatible with all web > content) - and yet most browsers do support turning them off so there must > be some value for a subset of users. Have you ever tried to browse the web with javascript or images turned off? It's not an experience most users would say is useful. > I think there are some potentially conflicting goals for any of the HTML > APIs: > 1) Providing a single lowest-common-denominator API that we can support on > every single platform to provide the maximum amount of compatibility. For > notifications, pretty much every capable platform can display an icon and a > single line of text, so if we wanted to be pedantic we could make that our > API, but the currently proposed "icon + header + body" text is probably more > reasonable. > 2) Providing an API that is flexible enough to take advantage of the > capabilities of more advanced platforms. > 3) Future proofing the API (as capabilities of platforms grow, the API can > continue to support them) I disagree with 2 and 3 being goals. Taking advantage of platform capabilities isn't a goal in and of itself, it's just a mean. Providing a better user experience is the goal IMHO. If users that want to use Growl can't get their browser notifications through growl because the browser was forced to use some other mechanism to implement HTML notifications, then we haven't improved that users experience. Even worse, if they don't get *any* notifications because the website didn't provide a non-html equivalent, then we certainly haven't helped that user. / Jonas
Received on Thursday, 11 February 2010 07:25:24 UTC