Panel icon / applet support for programs / possible Linux Desktop Standard

The situation: I have created a small Python commandline utility to open connections to various internal services that we use all the time at work. It works great (naturally, it is done by me), but I was thinking that I'd love to create a simple GUI for it: open / close connection, show status of connections.

Now, its been many years since I last did native desktop UI development so I got thinking that it would actually be great to have it integrated as a small applet sitting on the dock / panel. Since most of my team uses Mint as the few recovering Windows users adopted that one right away and it just works for our needs, I was thinking of making a Cinnamon applet.

But after staring the Slack icon on the same panel where the Cinnamon applets are and realizing that Slack is not an Cinnamon applet, it occurred to me: years ago I recall reading that there was an attempt to standardize desktop functionality so that it would be possible for programs to, for example, add panel applets / icons in uniform way.

So the two questions are: is there such standard? And is there some information how one could utilize it from Python?

TIA!