This specification defines the management of visual items, usually icons used for reporting the status of an application to the user or provide quick access to common actions performed by that application. It is intended to be complementary but not directly related with the Freedesktop's Desktop Notifications specification and is aimed as a replacement to the Freedesktop System tray specification, though more model-view oriented, giving more freedom to the workspace how to graphically represent the items coherent to its visual style language.

This specification does not define what the aspect of the Notification Items will be, this is strictly implementation specific.

Example use cases include: