[whatwg] Form submission progress display by UA (incl. file upload)

[Ian Hickson]

On Thu, 24 Jan 2008, Mikko Rantalainen wrote:
>
> Consider a form with a file input. User selects a huge file and hits 
> submit. Most UAs do not display nothing but an animated throbber until 
> the full submit is done and the download progress bar only starts to do 
> anything after the full submit part is already done. An another example 
> could be a long blog article that is being sent over an GPRS mobile 
> connection (with common speeds around 9kbps).
> 
> I think that WF2 section 5.6 
> (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-forms/current-work/#methodAndEnctypes) 
> should be modified to say something along the lines
> 
> "User agents with interactive user interfaces should inform the user 
> about the progress of the data submission. For example, an UA with a 
> graphical user interface could display a visual progress bar which would 
> be updated once every second; the bar would be initially displayed as 
> empty and would fill over time as the encoded form data set is 
> transmitted. For transmissions that take more than a few seconds UA 
> might in addition display estimated time before done."
> 
> Rationale: Upload progress monitoring is becoming more important every 
> day as browsers are often used for content authoring, the digital 
> content gets bigger and common user connections are highly asymmetric 
> (e.g. 24mbps downstream, 1mbps upstream in case of ADSL2+). The delay 
> expected by the user for sending a 100MB file could be close to 
> downloading a 100MB which is not the reality. An user in a hurry would 
> hit stop button and retry again after waiting for some time without 
> knowing that upload is in progress.

I don't think we really should be saying anything about UI to this level 
of detail. We don't say that there should be a progress bar when the page 
loads, either. I recommend petitioning your UA implementor to add this.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
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