Re: [Webpush] Non-blocking comments on -05

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

On 10 June 2016 at 05:01, Kit Cambridge <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Does moving a subscription set mean another UA would be able to receive messages sent to subscriptions in that set? (That is, without requiring the old UA to drop all its subscriptions and the new UA to reregister).

I think that you have it. If you have 2 subscriptions that are in the
same set, they have to be monitored together.  If they are in separate
sets, then they can be monitored separately.  The separation enables
intermediation.

I don't think that this is a use case that is particularly important
for the web case; I confess that it isn't that interesting to me.
However, I think that it is an entirely valid use case, and it costs
little.  It does however enable things on the web side that *are* very
interesting to me.

Say you have a UA that wants to go into a deep sleep to save power.
In that mode, it still wants to receive push messages from several
high priority sites.  But it doesn't want to get the deal-of-the-day
and all that junk from other sites.

Now, the UA knows that the push service is unable to discriminate
between important and unimportant properly and it doesn't want to risk
getting things like text message notifications from unimportant sites.
Even if these are normally sent with moderately high urgency,
legitimately.

If it can split the important sites and the unimportant sites into two
subscription sets, then it can monitor the important sites only.
That's not possible if you don't allow the UA to control which
subscriptions get grouped together.

If you want a concrete example, think pagerduty.com vs. skype.com.  A
call might be entirely undesirable at 3am, but if a production site is
on fire, it's wake up time.