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

[Mikko Rantalainen]

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.

-- 
Mikko

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