[whatwg] Installed Apps

[Michael Davidson]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 5:38 PM, Maciej Stachowiak<mjs at apple.com> wrote:
> * Notification Feeds *
>
> Often, web applications would like to give users the option to subscribe to
> notifications that occur at specific times or in response to server-side
> events, and for the user to get these UI notifications without a
> prerequisite that the web app is open or that the browser is running. There
> may be a desire to do client-side computation as well, but often just the
> ability to give the user a notification solves the basic user interaction
> problem.
>
> One possible way to address this kind of use case is to let users subscribe
> to a "feed" of notifications. This feed could use standard syndication
> formats, such as RSS or Atom. But instead of being displayed in a

This is an interesting idea. The lack of push updates, though, would
make it much less useful than it could be.

Here's a rough sketch of a more far-out idea: What if all browsers
were XMPP clients and stanzas could be sent to display notifications?
The attack surface would still be low, but you'd get realtime updates.
Instead of subscribing to a feed of notifications, the user accepts
what is essentially a chat invitation from the site. Like normal XMPP
invitations, this would be revocable at any time.

Lots of issues to work out, but you'd get realtime for free.

Michael