Comments on: The wrong way to do a shopping cart

By: JonR

JonR — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:55:48 +0000

i ignore these warnings and often resubmit order forms if they look like they’re timing out. i’ve never been charged twice for anything, and i assume that if i ever am then a quick email or phonecall will resolve the issue. why worry?

asking people not to resubmit forms is like asking people not to use their back button – it ain’t gonna happen.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:27:02 +0000

@Brian: I browse with Firefox and NoScript, so by default Javascript is disabled for every page I visit. It’s safer and cuts out a lot of annoying clutter.

By: Shivasubramanian A

Shivasubramanian A — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 09:26:10 +0000

Being in India, I often use the Indian Railways site. They follow the same method of preventing users from re-submitting the form. You can observe this by visiting their site (http://www.indianrail.gov.in/) –> Train Between Important Stations –> click Get It button –> click Get Availability button. You get a message asking you not to re-submit.

I don’t think they use AJAX, though, but still if some error does occur, then the user is stuck.. Of course, he can always refresh… Or may be they are confident about the robustness of their code…

I once clicked the Get Availability button, and immediately pressed Esc (jus testing). Further clicks of the button were met with the message, “Please wait… availability query is in progress…”

By: Noah Slater

Noah Slater — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 08:46:10 +0000

@Bryan @Alan

But it’s all very well to declare that we should say “to hell with them” from your ivory tower of Windows Vista with all the latest plug-ins installed, but for the visually impaired person just trying to get some simple task done you arrogance is extremely damaging. I happen to do a lot of text-mode browsing, simply because I am working remote via SSH quite a bit, I know quite a few people in the same situation. We don’t all run Windows and we don’t all have graphical displays.

The web is built on the principal of universality. Web pages are meant to work on every device out there, no matter what shape/size or ability. If you don’t know what “progressive enhancement” means you shouldn’t be in this industry.

By: Alan Shutko

Alan Shutko — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:31:44 +0000

Our intranet app uses tons of JS. You can’t even log in without JS enabled. Screen readers work just fine with it. I can’t remember which ones we currently have people using, but JAWS is one of them.

The idea that accessibility tools are as limited as Lynx is a common misconception.