Fwd: Re: tigert's mockups and HTML

[Franco Catrin]

El mar, 21-09-2004 a las 12:14, Christian Hammond escribió:
> I thought I'd forward this along for some discussion.
> 
> One more e-mail coming.

Nice discussion

I almost agree with all the drawbacks that having HTML in notifications
have.  And I'd add that it promotes abuse/misuse.  I imagine a lot of
applications showing notification in different ways/styles

A solution for this should be an HIG entry for notifications, but I
don't see the point of enforcing a particular HTML formatting in
notification's client applications

A different approach is to send notifications as a formal XML, it may
include all the current parameters, simplifying the protocol. (that's
another topic)

This XML will be rendered by the notification applet as good as it can.

A simple notification applet will render this XML as a simple markup
language, like the one used right now.

A more complex notification applet will render this as XHTML as tigert
wish.

For this rendering to take place, the applet could use simple parsing,
or use a XSL file to make the conversion.

Then, the HIG and/or the notification spec should say what tags should
be included in the notification.  Theme authors should provide the XSL
for their theme, solving the problem of consistency between the
notification presentation and the desktop theme.

Simple example:

Application client sends:

<?xml blah bla.. ?>
<notification>
	<title>Low Battery</title>
	<text>Your battery is too low, go and plug your machine</text>
	<icon>battery</icon>
	<sound>alert</sound>
</notification>

A simple notification applet (or configuration) will render:

<span size="large" weight="bold">Low Battery</span>Your battery is too
low, go and plug your machine


A better notification applet (or configuration) will render:

<table>
	<tr colspan="2"><td class="title>Low Battery</td></tr>
	<tr><td class="icon"><img src href="....

I hope you got the idea.


Benefits:

- Clients are simple

- Notifications are themeables

- Low end machines still work fine, while high end machines render
powerful notifications, like the one drawn by tigert

- Notifications are extensibles, this should make implementations more
easy to update to newer needs


-- 
Franco Catrin L. TUXPAN
http://www.tuxpan.com/fcatrin