Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Double-clicking on the Web

ma.ttias.be

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–109 of 109 posts

Re: Double-clicking on the Web

#101

Post by smorrow »

quesera wrote: post #55
smorrow wrote: post #36

I was using that Google 3D plot viewer thing the other day and assumed right-click-dragging would do something for me. It didn't, and it occurred to me that the reason we have this is that Microsoft, Apple, or some other microcomputer vendor once decided people were too dumb to know they have more than one finger. And now on the subject of double-clicking, it occurs to me that if the one-finger thing hadn't been the…

I think you'd be less dismissive if you were better informed about your topic.

If we're being objective, I think we can agree that having multiple buttons is more basic and more self-evident knowledge than being able to click a button in multiple ways.

Re: Double-clicking on the Web

#102

Post by smorrow »

KJasper wrote: post #20
denma wrote: post #3

That 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.

Exactly a lot of real world (older) users do this and I cringe a little every time I see it. They don't even know that you can single click. This isn't a huge issue, but it's much more common than the people here seem to think.

"They don't even know that you can single click."

I see alot of younger people are like this about some things. (but not single-clicking obviously.)

How about raking your scrollwheel through fifteen pages to get somewhere? Analog scrolling, I call it. Because that's what it is, a skeuomorph of scrolling through a microfilm... I would've thought the advantage of having a computer was that you can go directly to page n, to line n, whatever.

In terms of efficiency, I would liken the scroll wheel to the arrow keys: it's alright for small distances, but not more.

Re: Double-clicking on the Web

#103

Post by cxseven »

ptx wrote: post #76

This makes no sense. The examples he gives of "double-clicks everywhere" are all instances of the same thing: items that are selected with single-click and opened with double-click. We're not "trained to double-click anything", unless some particular trainer is extremely misguided. Double-clicking is used when there is some action available for an item in addition to the single-click action, where the double-click us…

Self-guided experience "trains" many people, and some of them infer a rule that double clicking is for opening things. Older people especially can fail to notice that many widgets respond to their first click and continue with the same action on the second click, so their behavior doesn't stand much chance of correction.

Re: Double-clicking on the Web

#104

Post by nailer »

xrstf wrote: post #37
nailer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50 should be a constant called NEXT_TICK with a value of 0. This makes it run on the next event loop, ie, default event submit form, next tick afterwards the form is disabled

You are looking for setImmediate[1]. EDIT: Oh, never knew that this method was a Node-ism only. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/setI...

Actually it's common enough that

    var setNextTick = function(nextTickFunction){window.setTimeout(nextTickFunction), 0})
...sounds like a damn good idea.

Hate the name 'setImmediate' though, immediate implies the current tick and people would wonder why you're using it.

Re: Double-clicking on the Web

#105

Post by Retra »

DonHopkins wrote: post #100
Retra wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Following a link and opening a directory are distinct enough in most people's minds to not confuse the two. That's why hyperlinks are normally underlined, colored, and give you a different mouse cursor.

I disagree that you can make such a sweeping statement without evidence, having worked on HyperTIES [1] [2], an early hypermedia browser and authoring system with Ben Shneiderman, who invented and published the idea of underlining links, and who has performed and published empirical studies evaluating browsing strategies, single and double clicking, touch screen tracking, and other user interaction techniques. Hyperl…

You can't just request informed studies without providing funding.

Re: Double-clicking on the Web

#106

Post by Retra »

sjwright wrote: post #98
Retra wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So rather than fix your one server to be more robust, every one of the thousands of browsers that exist should change?

Rather than tweak the top four web browsers to be more intelligent towards actual user intent, every one of the millions of web applications should change?

How do you know what user intent is? If I'm holding the F5 key down, what do you think I want to happen? What if I'm running a plugin that does that for me? What if I'm writing my own web crawler or something?

Yes, I expect everyone who writes a web application to make it able to handle server requests reliably. There is no such thing as making a robust request -- a browser is just a browser. It doesn't know enough about your server to know what it doesn't like or can't handle. It also doesn't know enough about the user to know what their intent is.

You are blaming the pipeline for end-point issues.

Re: Double-clicking on the Web

#107

Post by sjwright »

Retra wrote: post #106
sjwright wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than tweak the top four web browsers to be more intelligent towards actual user intent, every one of the millions of web applications should change?

How do you know what user intent is? If I'm holding the F5 key down, what do you think I want to happen? What if I'm running a plugin that does that for me? What if I'm writing my own web crawler or something? Yes, I expect everyone who writes a web application to make it able to handle server requests reliably. There is no such thing as making a robust request -- a browser is just a browser. It doesn't know enough a…

> How do you know what user intent is?

I can tell you what it's unlikely to be. It's unlikely to be to fire HTTP requests at the arbitrary keyboard repeat of their particular computer. It's unlikely to be to machine gun off HTTP requests so rapidly that no pages ever get rendered.

Or perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps there's a reasonable user behavior I'm forgetting. Please, enlighten me.

> If I'm holding the F5 key down, what do you think I want to happen?

At a guess, it would be to refresh the page repeatedly. In which case the ideal browser behavior might be to refresh the page at the maximum possible speed that would still allow some kind of visual feedback. Perhaps it could repeat as soon as the previous requests hits first paint. That would make sense.

Re: Double-clicking on the Web

#108

Post by mbell »

yesiamyourdad wrote: post #95
mbell wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with REST, the same issues exist.

What do you mean it has nothing to do with REST? It's an application built on HTTP. The same issues do not exist. Response 2 does not return "silent success" it returns 409 Conflict. The client can distinguish between conflict & success.

The error codes nor the transport are important here.

You can make an arbitrary number of requests that can respond with various responses (or fail) in arbitrary order. Who do you listen to? Which response is 'correct'? Sure you can build a service on the client to track the requests, the order they are issued in, what responses supersede other responses, how long to wait for all responses, etc, etc. But why build such a complicated solution to such a simple problem?

Re: Double-clicking on the Web

#109

Post by DonHopkins »

Retra wrote: post #105
DonHopkins wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that you can make such a sweeping statement without evidence, having worked on HyperTIES [1] [2], an early hypermedia browser and authoring system with Ben Shneiderman, who invented and published the idea of underlining links, and who has performed and published empirical studies evaluating browsing strategies, single and double clicking, touch screen tracking, and other user interaction techniques. Hyperl…

You can't just request informed studies without providing funding.

Of course I can. I said "Can you at least refer me to some empirical studies that support your claim, please?", and I provided links to informed studies that I and other people published.

But I'll humor you: How much funding would you suggest that I should offer him to look up some proof of what he said on google or wikipedia? And how much money should I have asked him to pay me for the information I gave him for free?

I didn't realize it was customary to pay people for supporting their statements with evidence on Hacker News. Can you please refer me to the section of the FAQ about that? Or do you have Hacker News confused with Kickstarter or experiment.com?

Post reply on HN