News that finds you, including when nothing of ours is open

The dots covered Reports and Messages from the day those sections existed. The
announcement did not: only a chat reply produced an HX-Trigger, so a scheduled
run that filed a report or posted into Messages lit a green dot in a corner and
said nothing at all. That is precisely the arrival nobody is watching for -- a
chat reply is one you asked for a moment ago and are probably looking at.

So every kind announces, each with its own once-only flag, and the payload is a
list of items rather than of titles, because a notification is a thing you click
and a title cannot say where.

One arrival, three channels, and they must not all fire. A toast for somebody
looking at the page; a count in the tab title while it is hidden, cleared on
focus; a system notification for somebody elsewhere entirely. The service worker
is the only place that can tell them apart -- the server cannot see whether a
window is focused and the page cannot see a push it did not receive -- so it
stays quiet when one of its own windows has focus.

And web push, hand-rolled against RFC 8291 and RFC 8292 with the cryptography
already here for Fernet. It exists because everything else is polled by an open
page, and the arrival worth interrupting somebody for is a schedule firing at
seven in the morning with the laptop shut.

The trade is real and is written down rather than glossed: the POST goes to
Google's or Mozilla's push service, the payload is sealed end to end so they
cannot read it, and what they do learn is that this server sent something and
when. Opt-in per device, off until asked for, and the rest of the system works
without it. Nothing else in LLeMbas contacts an outside service on its own.

The encryption is tested by decrypting it back with an independent
implementation of the specification's other half. There is no other way to know:
a push service accepts the POST and forwards bytes it cannot read, so a wrong
derivation is a notification that never appears, with a 201 in the log.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Jaroslav Beneš
2026-08-06 11:11:04 +02:00
parent feca8861a1
commit fb54a236ae
18 changed files with 1616 additions and 28 deletions
+44
View File
@@ -254,3 +254,47 @@ def test_the_file_picker_asks_for_files():
# Directories stay a step in file mode, or a file two folders down is
# unreachable.
assert app.count("[data-dir-open]") >= 2
def test_a_notification_is_never_shown_to_somebody_looking_at_the_page():
"""Three channels carry one arrival and they must not all fire at once: the
toast is for somebody watching, the tab-title count for somebody in another
tab, and the system notification for somebody elsewhere entirely.
The service worker is the only place that can tell -- the server cannot see
whether a window is focused, and the page cannot see a push it did not
receive. Driven under a DOM stub; what is pinned here is that both halves
of the decision exist.
"""
worker = (ROOT / "web/static/js/sw.js").read_text(encoding="utf-8")
# The page half: nothing but a toast while it is being looked at.
assert "document.hidden" in SOURCE
# The worker half: no notification when one of its own windows has focus.
assert "clients[i].focused" in worker
assert "showNotification" in worker
def test_the_tab_title_count_re_reads_its_base():
"""The title is rewritten by navigation and by a rename arriving out of
band, so a base captured once would pin the old name until a reload."""
assert "replace(/^\\(\\d+\\)\\s*/" in SOURCE
def test_permission_is_only_ever_asked_from_a_gesture():
"""`requestPermission` is refused outside one, silently. A checkbox restored
on load and acted upon would look exactly like a switch that does nothing,
which is the failure this codebase keeps cataloguing."""
settings = (TEMPLATES / "settings.html").read_text(encoding="utf-8")
# A button, not an input whose `change` writes.
assert "data-notify-toggle" in settings
assert '<button class="btn" type="button" data-notify-toggle' in settings
assert "requestPermission" in SOURCE
def test_turning_notifications_off_also_drops_the_registration():
"""Leaving it would mean this server going on POSTing to a third-party push
service for something the reader has switched off."""
assert "/api/push/unsubscribe" in SOURCE
assert "pushManager" in SOURCE