[whatwg] Submission progress

[Jim Ley]

On Sun, 7 Nov 2004 19:18:39 +0000, Afternoon <afternoon at uk2.net> wrote:
> > Equally, the upload is only a component of the time taken to perform a
> > post, with a countdown, the user will expect immediate response, even
> > if the server is going to spend a number of minutes processing the
> > data.
> 
> The browser could sidestep this problem by displaying an upload
> complete message. 

as a web application developer, I don't the browser doing this sort of
stuff, I want the browser doing as little as possible, giving me the
ability to do more with extra events, sure, that seems reasonably - a
submissionProgress event would be welcome (not sure it's essential,
but it would be nice) but forcing the UA to throw up dialogs and
messages are annoying.

> Using a frames to submit in the background is a solution which tries to
> work around browser deficiencies. 

No it's not! it's so that users can carry on working during the
submission, whilst it's not the most elegant method, it does work
well, the user can continue interacting with the application, dead
time in web-applications is the biggest problem, users don't normally
expect to not be able to do anything after pressing save.

> Though I may have misunderstood WHAT WG's intentions.

Who knows, there's only been 2 posts from the WG in the last 2 months,
I'm pretty sure this is just a useful dumping ground for ideas now,
nothing seems to be going anywhere.
 
> > Popups annoy users.
> 
> Sorry, popup was the wrong word, I meant dialog.

I still don't think it's a different thing - it's just got a different
name now :-)

>  If not, a user will often assume that the application
> is broken and go away after as little as 10 seconds.

I've not seen that, I've had applications which accept powerpoint
movies, up 20mb were accepted, and people waited, managing
expectations in web-applications can't be done by constraining the
application to a particular UI.   I think we need freedom, enough
events to build whatever we want.

Jim.