I find my most creative work comes from being restricted from doing something the way I'd initially want to do it. When being forced to work within confined limits, you can often come up with an elegant solution that's cooler and more usable than existing implementations. Instead of having wacky IFrames and stuff, what if you would use a slightly-less-standard paradigm for user feedback? Start with the basics. To preach to the choir, I almost ALWAYS set the cursor property if I'm doing time-consuming requests, as Mr. Newton suggested. I'm not sure why, but even something as subtle as that seems to have a huge effect on the user of the site. If you think you need more feedback than that, what if you did a "Loading..." message in the style of GMail? Something like that could integrate beautifully with the design of your site, and would give your app a really novel feel.
But, of course, it always depends what you're going for. If you really really really need to simulate that browser behavior, IFrames are the only way to go. However, I imagine that the extra requests to IFrames + extra load on your server + JavaScript overhead would make your AJAX site load just as slowly (if not more so) than a traditional site, which seems to defeat the purpose of AJAX in the first place (especially when you consider its usability concerns for the outskirts of the internet world -- screen readers, old web browsers, javascript- blocking firewalls and paranoid javascript disablers. Coincidentally, the people I find I need to emulate "traditional" methods for to avoid confusing them are the same people that -- of course -- use screen readers, old web browsers, and the like. At which point, I make sure the site gracefully degrades, and kill two birds with one stone. On Jul 10, 4:28 pm, Ryan Florence <[email protected]> wrote: > :D > > Momentary lapse of reason... > > Sent from my iPhone > > On Jul 10, 2010, at 10:35 AM, jiggliemon <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > @Ryan > > > OMG <--- meant to be rude. > > > -Chase > > > On Jul 9, 9:37 pm, Aaron Newton <[email protected]> wrote: > >> <facepalm> > > >> On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Ryan Florence <[email protected]> wrote: > > >>>> For now I'm thinking about a class, similar to Request.HTML that gets > >>>> stuff into an iframe, loads it, then returns the content into > >>>> onSuccess and removes the iFrame? Not AJAX, but might work - would > >>>> that make sense? > > >>> If I was forced to code it I would have the request be a normal request > >>> and then add onRequest and onComplete events. > > >>> onRequest I'd create an iframe element with a src pointing to a file, > >>> that, > >>> on the server side (assuming php) is just a big long sleep(), like > >>> sleep(10000000000). That should force the browser into a "loading state". > > >>> And then onComplete destroy the iframe element. > > >>> I love to beat dead horses. A simple indicator by the link or over the > >>> content that's updating is enough ...
