NYCPHP Meetup

[Jake McGraw]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 10:49 AM, David Mintz <david at davidmintz.org> wrote:
>
> I've got users working collaboratively all day long on a set of database
> records. The view in front of them is frequently stale. A common old Web 1.0
> approach to solve this was to reload the page automatically every n seconds
> with a meta refresh. Nowadays we have xhr. Either way, my concern is as the
> W3C points out, an unexpected refresh can disorient users.

What the W3C recommendations fail to take into account, is that you're
developing a web application, not a static text reference. Since
you're presenting information that will be meaningless after five
minutes, the "web page as a permanent reference" paradigm can be
thrown out the window. Feel free to employ any method to solve the
problem.

>
> I have thought of displaying a thingy at page load time that says "reloading
> automatically in 5 minutes" and then updating via Javscript it to count
> down  4, 3, 2 and after maybe 30 seconds start counting off seconds, then
> update via ajax. The upside is they won't get (or at least shouldn't be)
> surprised. The downside is more clutter, potentially annoying and/or
> distracting. But I think you could put a discrete little timer thingy that
> ought not be too irritating.
>
> I understand the problem is so common that someone has coined "Asynchronous
> MVC."

Really depends on the interval at which the information becomes stale.
I would probably go with the timer idea, but provide a text
description for how old the data is:

Information is X minutes old.

Implementing a feature like this is trivial, so, I suggest setting up
a stripped down version and see what the end user response is.

- jake

>
> What do YOU do about this sort of thing?
>
> --
> David Mintz
> http://davidmintz.org/
>
> The subtle source is clear and bright
> The tributary streams flow through the darkness
>
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