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i would like to suggest a significant change concerning active notifications 
(popups).

currently, applications such as kmail that do various activities in the 
background (e.g. check mail boxes periodically) display a modal (active) 
popup window if a recoverable error occurs (such as a connection temporarily 
dropping).

fundamentally i believe this may be wrong.

if a job is happenning in the background (i.e. it is a "passive task"), i 
believe any (non-terminal) notifications it needs to give to the user 
likewise be passive. active notifications, i believe, should only be used 
when the application in question can be sure to have the user's attention 
anyway, or absolutely needs the users attention before anything else may 
continue.

non-terminal active notifications (focus stealing popups) resulting from 
passive tasks can only possibly disrupt the users workflow, *requiring* the 
user to disengage from their current task and perform a mental "stack push". 
i do not believe the user must be *forced* to do this.

changing such popups to (subtly, but noticeably placed) passive notifications 
would alleviate this problem.

defining a style rule such that that "any passive task that causes a 
recoverable error should provide only a passive notification at most", i 
belive, would prevent this problem from happenning in the future.

comments?

gav
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