Re: [whatwg] Notifications and service workers

On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 4:24 PM, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:
>>> * Alternatively, maybe we could simply get rid of the "close" event
>>> entirely. Does it have a use-case?
>>
>> Yeah:
>>
>> * User gets new chat message
>> * Push message
>> * Notification
>> * User reads chat message but doesn't need to respond, dismisses
>> notification
>> * Close event
>> * Message sent to the server to make message as "read"
>> * Notifications auto-dismissed on other devices the user has
>
> Hmm.. is "close" really a decent proxy for "read"? I personally often
> read notifications without clearing them, since I read the temporary
> on-screen notification. And on occasion when my notification tray
> overflow, I clear notifications without reading them.
>
> But I hate using my own usage patterns in design. Do we have any data
> on what native applications do with similar callbacks? Assuming they
> exist in other notification platforms...

The use-case presented by Jake seems precisely opposite what actually
happens today in multiple apps, as I alluded to in my previous email:

>> * Alternatively, maybe we could simply get rid of the "close" event
>> entirely. Does it have a use-case?
>
> I'm also not sure, on first thought, how an app would respond to a
> close event.  I don't think that apps on Android currently care if you
> close a notification?  At least, nothing that I use seems to do
> anything about it; IRCCloud, for example, doesn't mark mentions as
> already read if I close the mention notification.  Some use-cases
> would be useful.

None of Twitter, Hangouts, or IRCCloud cares a whit if you close their
notifications; they still record stuff as unread until you actually
visit the app.  I can't recall any other app I've ever used treating a
notification closing as a significant event and taking any action,
either.  So, at least based on my immediate testing and long-term
memory of the notification patterns of the apps I use, I don't think
there's any use-case for a close event.

The one example I can think of that's kinda like this is the Google
Maps Navigation "Notification".  It actively resists being closed, for
one thing, but it does have a Dismiss button on itself (because it's a
Rich Notification or whatever), which when pressed also cancels
navigation in the app.  This seems like a specialized function of the
app itself, using some future form of rich notifications, though, and
not something we can or should generalize to other apps.  It's
definitely not an example we should generalize to generic "clearing
out all my notifications" behaviors, because it explicitly resists
such things and requires an affirmative and purposeful action on the
part of the user to dismiss it.

~TJ

Received on Thursday, 25 September 2014 23:43:47 UTC