[whatwg] Notification API

[Henri Sivonen]

I noticed that there's a Chromium-specific API for notifications:
http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/desktop-notifications/api-specification

Opera has an Opera Widgets-specific API:
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-widgets-specification-fourth-ed/#wo_showNotification

What's the right mailing list for discussing notification APIs?

Since the right people are likely reading this list:

It seems to me that it would be desirable to have an API that authorized Web apps can use to post notifications to Growl (Mac) or NotifyOSD (Ubuntu). HTML notifications look like an overkill to me.

It seems to me that Growl and NotifyOSD notifications have these things in common:
 1) Title
 2) Description
 3) Icon
 4) Ability to find out if the user clicked the notification. (Not yet in Karmic?)

To map that to a really simply Web API, a single method with four arguments could be added to the navigator object. The arguments would be:
 1) DOMString title (required)
 2) DOMString description (optional, LF means rendered line break)
 3) DOMString iconURL (optional, defaults to the favicon of the root browsing context of the script invoking the API)
 4) function acknowledgement (optional, callback that is called if the user clicks the notification; clicking should always bring the window/tab of the page that invoked the notification to front)

Does Chromium have use cases for HTML notifications that wouldn't be addressed by the simpler API outlined above? Does Opera have a reason for not allowing an icon and two distinct strings in notifications?

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/