Web Notifications Overview

This document defines APIs for alerting the user outside of a web page by displaying notifications. Notifications are displayed asynchronously and do not require user confirmation; events are specified for managing user interactions with notifications.

Status of this Document

This document is an Editor's Draft and is not suitable for purposes other than reviewing the specification being developed.

Table of Contents

• 1. Definitions
• 2. Requirements and use cases
• 3. Introduction
• • 3.1. Security
• 4. Parts
• 5. References

1. Definitions

• ambient notification: A notification which appears and disappears automatically without user action.
• interactive notification: A notification which can receive events from user actions and deliver them to the application which created the notification.
• persistent notification: A notification which is displayed until the user explicitly dismisses it.
• notification platform: A notification platform is a system outside the user agent which provides desktop notifications. Examples include Growl on MacOS, NotifyOSD on Linux, and the Windows notification API.
• simple notification: A notification which consists only of an icon and one or two lines of text.
• web notification: A notification which consists of Web platform content, such as HTML or SVG.

2. Requirements and use cases

This specification must meet the following requirements:

• An implementation which uses only the existing notification platforms in major platforms to display notifications must be able to comply with the specification.
• The specification must allow compliant implementations regardless of platform or device.
• The specification must provide controls to users in order to prevent unwanted notifications to be displayed.
• The specification must define an event model for interactive notifications.
• The specification must address security issues.
• The specification should not require any implementation to display persistent notifications.
• The specification should be compatible with other Web technologies, such as HTML and SVG.

The specification attempts to address the following use cases:

• An application alerts the user "you've got mail" in the form of an ambient notification, with no interaction necessary.
• An application alerts the user "you've got mail" as an interactive notification which allows the user to easily return to the inbox.
• A calendar application alerts the user for an upcoming meeting, and allows the user to easily specify a "snooze" delay of several possible time periods.
• A system alerts the user "your printer is out of paper".
• An application with multiple simultaneous execution contexts (like a multi-tab email application) wants to show notifications without creating duplicate notifications.

3. Introduction

This section is not normative.

This specification provides an API to generate notifications to alert users outside of the web page. It does not specify exactly how a user agent should display these notifications; the best presentation depends on the device where the user agent is run. When this specificiation refers to displaying notifications on the "desktop", it generally refers to some static display area outside the web page, but may take several forms, including:

• a corner of the user's display,
• an area within the chrome of the user agent,
• the "home" screen of a mobile device,
• et al.

This specification does not define exactly how the user agent should display the notification, and the API is designed to be flexible with respect to presentation options.

4. Parts

This document is composed of three parts:

• Feature Permissions - A specification for providing permissions for specific features such as notifications.
• Web Notifications - A specification for displaying simple notifications with text and icon content.
• Web URL Notifications - A specification for displaying Web notifications with content provided by a URL.

5. References

CORS

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing,