Comment 228 for bug 390508

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Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

When you first encounter a specification for a language or a protocol, it is common to consider it as inviolable. If a program implements the specification to the letter, everything will be okay, right? But it isn't so -- as any developer of an RSS parser, Imap client, or Web browser could tell you.

Instead, specification authors and implementors engage in a slow-motion negotiation about the de-facto workings of the thing being specified. For example, the HTML specification used to contain a <command> element. Browser developers decided they didn't want it, so it was removed. Similarly, the HTML specification currently describes a "srcset" attribute, implemented by WebKit, but the Firefox developers have decided it's a bad idea and they'll implement something else instead. But then or now, nobody would seriously respond to the statement "Firefox implements the HTML specification" with queqotion's dismissal of Notify OSD, "No, it doesn't". Those decisions were just part of the overall standards process.

In this case, as wirespot points out, the developers of probably the two most-used implementations of the notifications specification -- Notify OSD and Gnome Shell -- have *chosen* to ignore the timeout parameter. It is not "removing expire_timeout support" as quequotion suggests, and it is not "poor programming" as Heather suggests: it is an ab-initio design decision in both cases. You are welcome to criticize that decision. But since Windows, OS X, iOS, and (as best I can tell) Android don't let apps set notification durations either, you should at least recognize that you are in an obscure minority.

Finally, Heather, you seem to have misinterpreted my suggestion that app developers adapt the Notify OSD code for their own purposes. I did not suggest, and do not think, that they would need to "safely integrate it into whatever desktop notification system the end user happens to be using"; it would be completely separate. One example of this is in TextWrangler, a free text editor for OS X. If you search for some text that is not in the document, or if you type an unmatched closing bracket or parenthesis, you are immediately (synchronously!) informed of this using a custom overlay in the middle of the screen. These notifications do not integrate with OS X's Notification Center at all; they would be much worse if they did. I would enjoy seeing a text editor on Ubuntu borrowing some of Notify OSD's code to do the same.