Double-clicking on the Web
ma.ttias.be
Double-clicking on the Web
1–10 of 109 posts
Re: Double-clicking on the Web
#2Backward compatibility? Some click targets are meant to be clicked more than once, and can you guarantee that none of those targets may inadvertently be swept up in a change like this?
I'd flip the proposal around, and go for:
...
Since you can't guarantee a client will have this behavior, you have to plan for it anyway on the server. I think that's why features like this tend not to be deployed. Features that might help most of the time tend to be beaten to death by the people who keep insisting that they don't completely and entirely solve a problem, so somehow that means it's better not to have them at all, i.e. false hope.
Re: Double-clicking on the Web
#3That reminds me of the way my mother is using a computer. She clicks EVERYTHING twice. No matter if online or offline. That often causes problems. For example if you double-click an icon in the windows taskbar to open an application it opens twice.
Re: Double-clicking on the Web
#4As an interesting data point, since about a month Google Docs have introduced double-clicking as a gesture.
Re: Double-clicking on the Web
#5Backward compatibility? Some click targets are meant to be clicked more than once, and can you guarantee that none of those targets may inadvertently be swept up in a change like this? I'd flip the proposal around, and go for: ... The problem then is for the hung responses which still happen frequently enough, the typical hack to unfreeze a requeust is to mash the link/button a second time. Now, would the user have t…
never a good idea to camelCase html attributes :) (in case you didn't know, this won't work:
$('form').attr('onlyOnce')
but this will
$('form').attr('onlyonce')
if your attribute is written as onlyOnce
Re: Double-clicking on the Web
#6I don't disagree with the premise that double clicks are a broken thing on the web. There's too much of a cognitive shift between "the web" and "everything else" where double clicks are either a bad thing to do or a required action to complete tasks. Like the author said, even tech savvy people will double click things that they wouldn't need to.
But, saying that idempotency is hard and thus we should build features to get around it.. that seems wrong to me. The web is inherently a distributed system and you're going to have concurrent requests and weird edge cases that arise in those situations. The right way to handle that isn't to bandaid it with disabling client side behavior. That just hides to problem. Your server is the place to handle it.[1]
And, it really isn't that hard either. It's just a couple extra validations on your input before you do a write. There are places where it is more difficult but still not overly complicated to implement.
[1] Dogmatism alert. Of course, there are exceptions to everything that's a 'best practice'. Here, I'm just talking about disabling double-click as a general solution for the web to a concurrency problem.
Re: Double-clicking on the Web
#7Firefox seems to remove the second click sometimes. If I click a link, and then, while the page is loading but the old page is still visible change my mind and click another link, it sometimes ignores the second click. However it doesn't seem to happen all the time.
As an aside, the distinction between double click and single click used to be much clearer (in Windows 3.1/95 times!):
- If its on a white background, maybe in a well, then it is a selectable. Click on it to select it, right mouse button to do something with it, and double-click to do the default action with it (which is bold in the context menu).
- If it looks like a physical button (3D and raised), then you can perform an action by clicking on it.
Links are a bit odd, as they look selectable (and in fact they are, by clicking and dragging from outside in), but one click performs an action. But by now, they are so ubiquotious that everybody knows that one click activates them (Well, at least one click. Two clicks do no harm in most situations.)
What I hate about modern flat design is that it often removes these hints towards what kind of control something is (the "affordance" in hip UX speak). If I click/tap on something, does it get selected, opened, or does nothing happen because it is a label? No way to know without trying.
Re: Double-clicking on the Web
#8As an interesting data point, since about a month Google Docs have introduced double-clicking as a gesture.
I hate that. I have single click everywhere, all around in my usual OS... but not in Google Docs because there's no way to configure it.
Re: Double-clicking on the Web
#9Is it me, or why is a setTimeout needed in this example?
$(document).ready(function(){ $("form").submit(function(){ setTimeout(function() { $('input').attr('disabled', 'disabled'); $('a').attr('disabled', 'disabled'); }, 50); }) });
Re: Double-clicking on the Web
#10Are double click actions still a thing? Windows has had an option for single-click mode since forever, and most users I know use it – mainly because they're used to single click from the web. The remainder and most Mac/Linux users don't even bother and navigate with the keyboard.
I can't remember the last time I had to double-click anything, except for text selection.