So this is more like a response to a comment in my notification thingy writeup, but I think this is an important point, so I write a new entry. Besides, isnt the whole point of blogging to spam as much as you can? 
Anyway, the idea was that there should be a proper daemon or something to handle all this in the desktop. Yes, I agree.
But the idea to use Zenity initially is just that we need something that works to get started with. We need to define an API and a spec for the notifications at some point. It is a lot easier to define a spec and api that does not suck after we have some real world experience and the most common problems and issues are known. If we have a commandline tool to do the notifications, it’s easy to make little scripts that get info from the web and periodically notify us if there is relevant data. Like, a really stupid and trivial script that just monitors planet gnome RSS whether there is a new entry and does a bubble when it updates. Then we’d know that it would be nice to be able to embed links in the bubble content. And that it could fetch images from the web directly too via vfs or something.
Sure, it will be handled properly later, but its useful to be able to test stuff. And heck, I cannot write C. Whatever I do is going to be bash, perl or php. So zenity with notifications would also rock for myself who couldnt use it through a gnome api..
Cool. I didn’t realise that zenity was just the first step in a Grand New Notification Plan
I don’t write C either, mind, so as soon as someone said “here’s the gnome API call for tigert’s new notification popups” I’d have said “are there Python bindings?”
This will be greatness. Although I’m not sure whether it’s better to beef up gtkhtml so that it can handle the HTML, or just bite the bullet and make Gnome depend on Gecko…