KNotificationItem class name is confusing

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On October 28, 2009, Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
> - KNotificationAreaItem: This is consistent with the fact that these are
> items from the "Notification Area". Still it contains the word
> Notification, which I do not believe should be there.
> 
> - StatusAreaItem: I thought about this one when I read a post about the
> work done by Fedora people on systray icons [1]. In this post they call
> the icons "status icons".

"Area" is a misnomer since there is nothing that says it will appear in any 
specific Area, or in an Area at all. Systray is even worse since it specifies 
a very specific implementation. one of the motivators behind this new spec is 
to allow us to free ourselves from being stuck with a system tray or 
notification area if we wish to.

other suggestions such as "Ambassador" and "Satellite" are non-starters 
because the words have no intrinsic meaning or even hint at what the class is 
for at all. the risk of colliding with future feature sets that are 
"ambassador-like" or "include a satellite" (whatever those mean in the first 
place) is too high.

as for its relationship to notification, Davide Bettio has a patch that allows 
one to associate KNotifications with a KNotificationItem as well as set a 
KNotificationItem as the default for all KNotifications from a given 
application. add to this that everything the DBus spec does is advertise 
information and push updates about the status of application. so it's not 
completely unrelated to what we currently define as "notification".

concerns around the fact that it can also be for interaction purposes is a 
non-issue in my opinion. the interaction features are there because it is 
convenient and sensible to interact with the item that tells you about 
something; the interaction feature should not be the primary reason for using 
this class however.

i do like the names with "Status" in them more than the other alternative 
suggestions. possible names that would be both accurate and meaningful might 
include KApplicationStatusNotifier, KStatusNotifier, KStatusNotificationItem 
... ? i'm not sure using the term "Workspace" in there makes much sense, and 
saying -what- status is being communicated might be useful, though probably 
not critical.




as a side note, it would be great if we could make this the last thread on 
this matter. it is far from the first and i'm confident we have better things 
to do than rehash this conversation repeatedly.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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