Proposing the StatusNotifier specification

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2010-01-19 at 10:44 -0800, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:

> 
> the semantics of the operations as realized in a given visualization are not 
> overly specified to purposefully allow for flexibility in the visualization. 
> yes, there is an assumption here that those writing those visualizations 
> aren't idiots and are able to do their job with a bare minimum of competency. 
> i hope that isn't too much to ask.

Don't you see how totally incongruent your position is ? You say that
the old systray has been abused, and thus all freedom needs to be taken
away from the application writers. And then you turn around and ask for
total blanket freedom to be given to the 'visualization' writers,
because 'they aren't idiots'.

To give some concrete examples of the kind of missing guidance that is
needed to make this API useful for application writers:

   org.freedesktop.StatusNotifierItem.Title
   STRING org.freedesktop.StatusNotifierItem.Title ();

   It's a name that describes the application, it can be more
descriptive than Id.


Is this supposed to be a single word, a line, a paragraph ? Is it
supposed to include punctuation, or be capitalized ? Should it be the
same as the name that appears in the menu ?

Not specifying these things sure makes the spec flexible, but it also
guarantees that you will get a mix-and-match of different styles, which
will suck for the overall experience. Unless, as Dan pointed out, you
rely on everybody copying the one reference implementation in its
behavior - and then why bother with a spec in the first place ?