[wp-hackers] AJAX and responsiveness

[Andy Skelton]

On 8/21/06, Mark Jaquith <mark.wordpress at txfx.net> wrote:
> Do we really need to rewind the interface?  That seems like a lot of
> code for a very rare event.  Of course, I'm not really a JS guy, so
> maybe it wouldn't be so hard.  Michael D Adams... Andy Skelton...
> thoughts?

I can not point to any examples of the perfect AJAX interface but I
can guess what it might be like:

You click Delete and the deleted thing disappears pronto. Meanwhile
the asynchronous Delete request flies away to the server and we don't
bother checking for a response. We can be so arrogant because we know
that (pick one) everything always works or the user doesn't really
care if the deleted thing appears again on the next page load.

Do we all agree that this "perfect" example is built on an impossible
scenario? People will say it's broken if they have to delete one thing
twice due to an uncaught exception.

If you don't wait between clicks, you certainly have to keep the page
from unloading while you wait for each of your queued relays to
complete. That's an even more annoying wait because it's potentially
fifteen times longer.

Even Gmail makes you wait sometimes. That's why the Loading flag is
red. Red means STOP, WAIT. Is the goal to build a waitless interface?
Be realistic; this is the web. What is the goal?

Of course we have bulk moderation which is the fastest solution and it
doesn't use any Ajax at all.

Andy