Common Desktop Environment: Style Guide and Certification Checklist

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Urgent conditions that require immediate attention by the user, no matter which application or desktop service the user is currently accessing, are brought to the user's attention using audiovisual notification. The alarm is signaled in the current workspace regardless of the workspace in which the application resides. 

Applications should not send messages to command entry windows or to the UNIX console (that is, applications should not write to the default UNIX files stdout or stderr). Applications are often launched by double-clicking icons in the File Manager, Front Panel, or Application Manager, which means users will not see messages that are written to stdout or stderr. Even if the application is launched from a terminal window, the user may subsequently close the terminal window, and messages appearing there will often not be seen. Worse, if the user does not have a console window running (the console window is difficult to launch in Common Desktop Environment), messages intended for the console may blast across the screen and make everything look ugly.