Badging API for showing an indicator on a web app’s shelf icon

Hi WICG,

I’m proposing an API to allow web applications (as defined by the Web App Manifest standard) to set an application-wide badge, shown in an operating-system-specific place associated with the application (such as the shelf or home screen).

I’m on the Chrome team at Google, and looking for other browser vendors to work on the spec. We’re planning to start implementing a prototype in Chrome soon.

Links:

• Explainer
• Related Manifest bug
• Chrome implementation bug
• Chrome/Blink intent to implement email

Feedback would be best delivered as issues on the GitHub repo. Thanks!

Matt

Sounds pretty useful. We’ve talked about this kind of API in the past at the WHATWG. I’d be interested in seeing this prototyped and would like to follow along from the Mozilla side.

Transferred in - https://github.com/WICG/badging/.

Does it make sense to have a separate API for this or would it not make sense to add badges to the Notifications API?

Do you mean adding a similar API but put it in the notifications namespace (just because it’s thematically related)? Or actually tie it to the act of showing a notification?

We’ve considered both of these. We’re specifically trying to address the use case of developers who want to show a “subtle notification” without the full toast appearing on screen, so I don’t think it satisfies that use case if you have to show a notification at the same time. So that rules out the latter.

I don’t have a big problem with adding it in as part of the Notifications namespace, but it seems unnecessary (and potentially confusing) to do so.