On 2010-09-20 10:16, Olli Pettay wrote:
I do think browser UI for large uploads is terrible and needs to
be fixed.
I agree!
Yeah, the UI is terrible, but that is about browser implementations and
not about any specification.
Well! There is nothing preventing the specs from providing a minimum UI
guideline that should be followed by UAs.
Heck, MicroSoft has huge Styleguides on how to do UI stuff that
developers should follow.
I do not see why the HTML specs can't provide similar guidelines.
Now if a UA has what they believe are a better UI then that's fine, but
as a minimum they should at least implement the minimum UI as outlined
in the specs for example.
This way all UIs for HTML will have a common baseline, which can only
improve usability for the users, which is the key point regardless right?.
So things like upload/download and <video>/<audio> etc. really should
have a guideline to ensure a baseline UI that is consistent for user.
So a form submission if it takes too long (a guideline for what "too
long" is should also be specced as an advisory) should provide a
progress report either in the form of a progress bar or ETA or a
combination of the two, and the should support the ability to let the user
pause/continue (that depends on server features I guess) or even abort.
If this is clarified then maybe we wont need a dozen different
"uploaders" that may or may not work in this or that browser.
I've seen web form uploading, flash based uploading, java based
uploading, javascript based uploading, or even browser plugins,
I think the browser could do the uploading better and more safely,
thus the other methods can be used as fallback for older browsers or
alternatives in case the user prefers using one of them instead of the
built-in implementation.
There's an old saying, "if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right",
downloading has gotten a lot better, heck Opera supports .torrents which
is brilliant if a website provides webseeds as an alternative to just a
direct download,
uploading is really shaky, I Google Chrome actually has a upload
progress, Firefox does not (or rather it does bit it's broken?)
Interesting read
http://michaelkimsal.com/blog/why-do-browsers-still-not-have-file-upload-progress-meters/
Some of the comments might be worth looking over too.
Firefox upload progress bug
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249338
I think what Google Chrome does is adequate. I haven't tested multiple
uploads at the same time, but am I right in assuming that the upload
progressbar in Chrome is "per page" ?
So that the user could do uploads to two different sites and flick
between tabs to check the progress?
What I haven't noticed Chrome having is a upload overview window, so
that you could see the progress of all current uploads, similar to how
you can see all current downloads in say Firefox.
I've also missed the ability of being able to "queue" downloads (and
uploads), usually the darn browser tries to download everything at once,
being able to set a max simultaneous "file" limit for downloads and
uploads.
Using the search terms: browser upload progress bar
gives over a million hits on both Google and Bing.
the terms: upload progress bar
gives around half a million hits.
And the first few pages are all pretty much about showing progress while
uploading files with the browser, with various solutions.
I know how painfull it is to upload stuff without a progress. I recently
released 3 albums on indieTorrent.org and their old (current) upload
uses a basic HTML form.
Luckily they advised using Chrome since it showed upload progress (this
was first time I discovered Chrome had this), which let me stay sane as
I uploaded 58 audio tracks in lossless FLAC format.
I can't even imagine how frustrating it would be to upload a huge video
file with a normal upload form and no progress info.
So Chrome has upload progress, Firefox has a broken one, what does
current/upcoming IE, Opera and Safari browsers have?
--
Roger "Rescator" Hågensen.
Freelancer - http://EmSai.net/
