[whatwg] Status bars and progress indicators

[Asbjørn Ulsberg]

On Fri, 24 Sep 2004 01:09:17 +1200, Matthew Thomas <mpt at myrealbox.com>  
wrote:

> Perhaps, but there's a point where such device-agnosticism becomes more  
> religious than useful -- making life unnecessarily difficult for Web  
> authors trying to remember which element does what.

Maybe, maybe not. That depends on the situation and how agnostic the  
solution is.

> <input type="checkbox">, <input type="radio">, and <button> all have
> names that suggest a particular presentation; has this damaged anything?

Probably not, but there's a good reason these are replaced with more  
generic non-representative names in XForms, namely the 'select', 'select1'  
and 'trigger' elements.

> That it has made different people on this list think of dials and  
> speedometers, or "an indicator just like a progress bar", suggests that  
> it does not imply any particular presentation.

I can agree with this. The word «gauge» doesn't bring any particular  
presentation to my mind. Its function (to measure something) is what I  
think of, not how something is measured or how the measure is presented.

> Not at all. Progress meters are often used outside of status bars, in  
> situations where a status bar would be too feeble (for example, an  
> upload or download utility that needs a large progress meter because the  
> task is going to take hours so you may be keeping an eye on it from a  
> distance) or too single (any application where multiple simultaneous but  
> unrelated tasks are represented by multiple progress meters).

I agree with this as well. Status bars aren't the same as progress bars.  
Status bars can be used to notify the user of the progress of a given  
task, but often status bars display information that has absolutely  
nothing to to with progress.

-- 
Asbjørn Ulsberg    -=|=-     http://virtuelvis.com/quark/
«He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»