Comment by diplomatpuppy

I don't know why every thread about Web applications needs someone to tell me that technically HTML was just designed to be a document format. OK, great, now it isn't just that.

I solved this in a react app I’m working on by overriding XMLHttpRequest.prototype.open to listen for the request lifecycle events and update a global “percent loaded” used to render a progress bar at the top of the page.

It’s far from perfect but is at least a good enough heuristic for the user to know when the page is loading a request.

Try to load an AMP page with JavaScript turned off. It can take many seconds, and there is no loading indicator.

JS lets you easily implement bars that do reflect progress.

Turn on the animation => start an async action (e.g. a database call) => end the animation. An error occured? Show the error. Here, simple and informative to the user - and much better than raw html.

It's on desktop websites too, like YouTube (add to watchlist), and the delays are longer than 200 ms.

In particular, people don't like to feel they are wasting time. Walking being a "necessary" step, doesn't feel like a waste of time.

Seems like the passengers could have solved this themselves, by just walking in circles.

Except they had to spend the same amount of time walking. If presented as a choice I'd usually choose standing.

>when the progress bar is still getting asymptotically closer to the end

That, my friend, is an impressive command of the English language.

Thank you for teaching me the word asymptotically! [0]

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/asymptotically

This is the comic you're thinking of. http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/02/19/when-i-install-a-so... This was one of the comics that convinced me to add them to my RSS feed. I have not been disappointed since.

I do that whenever I have to wait on a progress bar. I zoom in with whatever accessibility options there are, then when a pixel is 3-5mm I put my mouse cursor at the end of the bar and wait.

Classic!

The article's discussion about the NYT election accuracy meter wiggling randomly (but within the error bars) is a textbook example of "vague but accurate" information, perhaps to a fault.

How do you visually represent "error bars" to someone who's not technical enough to have ever seen them? Not everyone takes college stats, math, and engineering.

Technically, wiggling within the error bars is a precise way of saying "the precise location is vague -- it's somewhere within this range", in that at any moment it is showing one precise, acceptable guess.

The most fascinating piece there was that as the error bars decreased, the range of the wiggling decreased as well.

Yeah, it doesn't convey the extend of the error bars instantaneously -- you need to stare at it over time -- but it does convey the idea of error bars.

I think the people upset about the error wiggle are either a) being pedantic that it's not visualized in the way they learned it should be visualized back in college; or b) they haven't accepted the idea that sometimes we don't have an exact precise black-and-white answer (we DO have ways to precisely quantify the degree of our uncertainty though).

All of this not to say it was the best execution... perhaps if they 'ghosted' previous needle positions like how old movie radars ghost a green blip as the thingie spins around, maybe it would have been a kind of hybrid approach where the error bars do kinda appear in the overlapping ghosting shadows but still change over time...

"reticulating splines"

I guess the lesson to be learnt here is that people are more understanding if you appear to be transparent but you don't have to ACTUALLY be transparent to get the affect.

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Oh dear. That garbage came with Cold Fusion (before it became ColdFusion), IIRC.