Intent to Implement: Notification image

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John Mellor

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Aug 24, 2016, 3:56:22 PM8/24/16
to blink-dev
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Spec

Summary
Allows developers to show a large image as part of the content of a notification (whereas the existing |icon| and |badge| properties tend to be icons and are rendered smaller).

Motivation
Allows for richer notifications.

Interoperability risk
Firefox: No public signals
Edge: No public signals
Safari: No public signals
Web developers: Strongly positive (explicitly requested by 5+ large partners)

Android, Windows 10 and Chrome OS all natively support showing a large image as part of the notification content (exact rendering varies, for example some platforms only show it when the notification is expanded, and some platforms may leave less room for text when an image is shown). macOS and iOS do not yet seem to support such images (they only support smaller icons).

There is no risk of breaking existing content. There is a small risk that we might want to change details later due to platform inconsistencies, but the spec is deliberately vague about if/how the image will be shown (since UAs are often constrained by the platform's notification capabilities), so we have a fair amount of leeway here.

Ongoing technical constraints
No, implementation is similar to existing notification icons.

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux,
Chrome OS, Android, and Android WebView)?
Yes, except Mac and WebView:
- It will work briefly on Mac, but stop being supported if/when we switch to the system notification center which does not support large content images.
- It will not initially be supported on WebView because notifications are not yet supported there.

OWP launch tracking bug
None yet. https://crbug.com/614456 tracks implementation.

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

Requesting approval to ship?
No.

Dimitri Glazkov

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Aug 25, 2016, 12:03:22 PM8/25/16
to John Mellor, blink-dev
On Wed, Aug 24, 2016 at 12:56 PM John Mellor <joh...@chromium.org> wrote:
Contact emails

Spec

Summary
Allows developers to show a large image as part of the content of a notification (whereas the existing |icon| and |badge| properties tend to be icons and are rendered smaller).

Motivation
Allows for richer notifications.

Interoperability risk
Firefox: No public signals
Edge: No public signals
Safari: No public signals
Web developers: Strongly positive (explicitly requested by 5+ large partners)

On the lack of public signals from other vendors: is that because they're not interested in this problem or because y'all haven't talked with them yet?

This seems like a great addition to notifications.

:DG<

John Mellor

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Sep 8, 2016, 1:44:00 PM9/8/16
to Dimitri Glazkov, blink-dev
> On the lack of public signals from other vendors: is that because they're not interested in this problem or because y'all haven't talked with them yet?

It's complicated :-)
- We've discussed it with Anne from Mozilla, who said the pull request looks reasonable, though we're waiting to hear back from Mozilla implementers.
- We've mentioned it to Microsoft, but they're heads-down on shipping SW+push+notifications, so haven't currently got much time for spec work in this area.
- Apple implement an older version of the spec that predates Service Workers etc, and don't comment on new features.
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