On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 7:56 PM, Marco Schuster marco@harddisk.is-a-geek.org wrote:
An improvement suggestion to the UI when uploading large files: display a progress bar like rapidshare.com does, so that user can see "ah, it's still uploading and didnt fail"
This is really something browsers should handle. I have no idea why they don't. The Mozilla bug is this:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243468
So everyone go vote for that. I've flagged it as blocking1.9.2? and wanted1.9.2?, which if we're lucky enough might not be rejected straight off. :) Maybe people could look for/file bugs on WebKit and/or Chrome (or Konqueror, or other open-source browsers too? I don't use either of those, so for all I know they already implement this, although I don't think so.
None of this is to say that it wouldn't be worth it to implement one of the hacky workarounds that some other sites have done. I suspect that there are better investments of time that could be made right now in streamlining the upload process, though, since it's such a mess in so many ways and this feature might be relatively hard to code well.
On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 7:43 AM, Daniel Kinzler daniel@brightbyte.de wrote:
Anyway, HTTP doesn't support feedback during upload (or any feedback, really)
Yes, this would have to be done using extra asynchronous requests of some kind if we have to do it on our end, like an iframe with Ajax, or a little Java applet.
and HTML does not offer a way for multi-file uploads (which would also be quite handy).
HTML5 doesn't seem to allow these either, for some reason . . .
"There must be no more than one file in the list of selected files." http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#file-upload-state
(So why don't they just say it represents a single file to begin with?)
On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 5:51 PM, Daniel Kinzler daniel@brightbyte.de wrote:
To get something that is easy to install and works cross-platform, how about a firefox plugin? Has anyone here any experience with writing one?
Forcing users to use an extension isn't great as a workaround for this, if we plan to work around it at all, since it will only affect the tiny minority of users who a) use Firefox and b) install the extension. If a Firefox extension is written, it would be most sensible to have it just generically provide an upload progress indicator for all uploads.