[whatwg] salvaging work while navigating away from a web app -- onunload="confirm('save before quitting?')

[Philipp Serafin]

Thomas Broyer schrieb:
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 3:03 AM, ddailey <ddailey at zoominternet.net> wrote:
>   
>> 4. Concerning the first thing I need to fix, I am not sure if HTML5
>> currently provides a solution for. Here's the sitch: because of an extensive
>> use of CTRL sequences in the interface, the user will sometimes accidentally
>> do something like CTRL R (which the browser thinks is a refresh command). In
>> a regular app, if users stand in jeopardy of losing all their work, the app
>> usually warns them before quitting. The way I found to work around it (that
>> used to work) was to use onunload="confirm('save before quitting?').
>> Currently, however, IE seems to have removed my ability to intervene before
>> it erases all work. onbeforeunload=function (){ fix(everything)} doesn't
>> seem to help either.
>>     
>
> I'm not sure you can automatically save but what you can do is cancel
> the unload with a prompt.
>   
What you can do for an "emergency save" is to fire a *synchronous* XHR 
during the unload event. This will freeze the UI but since the user was 
about to close the page anyway, this shouldn't matter much.