Notification quick reply DBus API

[David Edmundson]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 2:10 PM Mark Watts <watts.mark2015 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
>
Thanks for bumping this topic, it would be good to move that forward.

 I don't
> see the advantage of locating this capability in the notification
> system vs having the source applications themselves popping up their
> own reply dialog:


That is the current state if an application wants to have this feature.

It is worth expanding on why that is problematic:

 - On wayland, clients can't position themselves. This notification will be
positioned anywhere and it's effectively garbage.
 - On a phone and other platforms there are even more constraints
 - The current world /is/ fragmented on chat programs again. I personally
have 4 open right now.  The UX would be messy.
 - We (KDE/Plasma) keep a history of notifications after the popup is gone.
If an app did it's own popup we wouldn't get an entry, or if it sends a
notification and it's own popup we would get duplicate information on
screen.

For those reasons we tend to see applications prefer to use common specs
for current notifications instead of doing their own custom thing.
Which IMHO is a very good thing, but it means we need new common specs to
support additional  requirements.

>
> If
> applications do want a common way to do...less obtrusive message
> replies, why not have a "quick reply" interface that's its own thing -
>

Something bespoke would be a technically valid option.
But ultimately you then need to duplicate everything notifications already
have: Title, text, actions, dismissal and it puts the burden on application
developers to support two modes where only one is available duplicating all
notification and action handling code.

One of the reasons the proposal above ended up as it did, was due to a
requirement to make sure clients can have one code path and have it handled
implicitly.
We can debate pros and cons of that, but it comes down to a trade-off.

David
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