[webkit-dev] Notifications API

[John Gregg]

Sure.  We have the following plan for how to handle opt-in:
 - Use of the feature by script, if permission isn't granted to the origin,
should throw an exception, not present permissions UI.  So your insistent
porn site would have no effect on the user.
 - A dialog box asking for permission should only appear in response to a
user gesture like a click.  So in the normal case, an application will
present a user with a link "New: Desktop Calendar Notifications available!
Click here to setup."  And that link will present a prompt from the
user-agent "Do you trust calendar.com?  The site wants to display
notifications on your desktop.  [Yes/No]"  If the user says yes, script
running under that origin will have permission to show desktop
notifications.
- Permission should be removable through a menu which is accessible from the
notification UI itself.

As proposed the permissions policy is somewhat external to WebKit, which
contains the Javascript API layer but not the actual user-visible parts of
the system including UI, permissions flow, and filtering by origin which
will be in Chromium or another user agent.

 -John


On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 11:39 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:

> On Thu, 21 May 2009, John Gregg wrote:
> >
> > On the security question, a substantial amount of thought has gone into
> > how to prevent unwanted popups (and in general how to control access to
> > HTML5 application features).  We think user opt-in on an origin-basis is
> > the best policy and it's what we plan to do in Chromium; the WebKit
> > interfaces are structured so that the policy is up to the user agent via
> > a NotificationProvider interface.
>
> Could you elaborate on what you mean by "user opt-in"? A prompt or
> "installation" step seems like a poor user experience given that any site
> could start asking for this, and we don't want users to click "yes" to
> make the message go away (consider a porn site that just does "while
> notifications are not allowed, try to notify").
>
> --
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>
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