I've got users working collaboratively all day long on a set of database records. The view in front of them is frequently stale. A common old Web 1.0 approach to solve this was to reload the page automatically every n seconds with a meta refresh. Nowadays we have xhr. Either way, my concern is as the W3C points out, an unexpected refresh can disorient users.
I have thought of displaying a thingy at page load time that says "reloading automatically in 5 minutes" and then updating via Javscript it to count down 4, 3, 2 and after maybe 30 seconds start counting off seconds, then update via ajax. The upside is they won't get (or at least shouldn't be) surprised. The downside is more clutter, potentially annoying and/or distracting. But I think you could put a discrete little timer thingy that ought not be too irritating. I understand the problem is so common that someone has coined "Asynchronous MVC." What do YOU do about this sort of thing? -- David Mintz http://davidmintz.org/ The subtle source is clear and bright The tributary streams flow through the darkness
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