Comment 130 for bug 390508

> The first line of the Desktop Notifications Specification says

In my copy, the first line says that it is a draft (!) document for async event notifications.

> The first line of the Desktop Notifications Specification says,
>"The following messages MUST be supported by all implementations."
>There is no ambiguity.

Yes. Believe it or not, notify-osd does indeed support all these messages, with the same signatures (so all parameters are accepted as well). That says nothing about how it interprets the parameters. (Yes, I know, specs are hard to read.)

Concerning the interpretation of the expire timeout parameter, it's funny that you, while quoting so much from the spec, omitted the central sentence (probably because you didn't like it?): "The timeout time in milliseconds since the display of the notification at which the notification should automatically close."

There's a "should", a recommendation. The spec does not demand that the expire timeout parameter is respected. (In fact, if it did, it would be a fishy spec - an implementation could just as well chose (or offer config parameters to let the user chose) to not display any non-critical messages at all, but just log them to a file. Timeouts of a few seconds don't make any sense in a log file.)

> Nothing in the spec says "feel free to ignore this
> in your implementation", or "developers beware-
> implementations are free to ignore this and still
> be called compliant (i.e. don't expect this to actually work)".

As pointed out before, the spec gives a clear recommendation as to what clients should expect: "Clients should try and avoid making assumptions about the presentation and abilities of the notification server." Obviously, you're not following that recommendation. That's your choice, and also your problem.