[whatwg] Persistent SharedWorkers

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

Drew Wilson wrote on 06/03/09 23:39:
>...
> - Worker UI:
> From the worker standpoint, the main difference between a
> PersistentWorker and other types of workers is that the normal way of
> interacting with the user (via an open browser window) is not
> available, since there may be no windows open to the parent domain. We
> have yet to enumerate through all of the use cases, but our initial
> brainstorming came up with a few possible types of desired
> interactions:
> 
> 1) Display an icon in the OS status bar. This would be an unobtrusive
> way for a given domain to display things like "you have new mail" or
> even errors like "unable to contact server".

Speaking for Ubuntu, we are making active efforts to reduce the number
of elements in the notification area (aka "system tray"), with the items
remaining there being system-wide things rather than
application-specific things. We would not be willing to let Web
applications insert icons there. (Similarly, recent versions of
Windows have been more aggressive about hiding notification area icons
by default.)

>                                              If supplied with an
> onclick handler, this could also be the footprint for further types of
> user interaction:

We also plan to make panel elements behave consistently as menus, rather
than some being menus and others being buttons, so an onclick handler
alone wouldn't work so well even if we allowed the icon.

>...
> 3) Toast (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toast_(computing)
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toast_%28computing%29>) - behavior is
> similar to the showNotification() API that was previously in HTML5.
>...
> showNotification(url) - displays the HTML at the passed URL to the
> user via a toast popup. user agents may put restrictions on the size
> of the resulting window. The original HTML5 showNotification() API was much
> more limited (a few lines of unstyled text, an icon, and an onclick
> handler) - Dmitry Titov makes the case for full-HTML notifications
> here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dhg4xn62_28f8cwvzf8 - I have some
> concerns about phishing (since there's not necessarily any indication
> about the source of a given notification), so that may impact our
> implementation.
>...

Ubuntu 9.04 will feature initial work to ensure that notifications
either pop up above other windows, or are interactive, but not both.
(This is to avoid accidental clicks, and to allow interacting with
whatever is under a popup notification without having to close it
first.) Allowing arbitrary HTML in popup notifications would be
basically incompatible with that. We would be happy to let Web pages
show popup notifications using an icon and unstyled text, but not an
onclick handler.

Cheers
-- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/