[Sigia-l] Form Usability - Search & Cancel location

[Listera]

"Joe 10 Enterprises" wrote:

> There's no application in the world which insulates the user from not saving
> changes...

You don't mean that literally, do you?

Because you can essentially save any changes made after every keystroke
(heck, after any cursor movement of, say, greater than 10 points), if that's
what you wanted to do. So you can perfectly insulate the user from not
saving changes by sticking 'saving code' to any window/object/event that can
change. You could also save any changes, say, every 30 seconds
automatically. But that's on the desktop. On the web, this stuff would only
work with JavaScript code, attached to onUnload, onBlur, event handlers,
etc.

To get back on topic, since HTTP is stateless and once the server has
returned a page to the user agent it just doesn't exist any longer, the
"Cancel" button is unreliable. The user may never 'cancel' , 'quit' or close
a window, so that must be handled at the server by a separate process. I
suppose having it next to the 'Submit' button makes the programmer's job
slightly easier, but taking it out completely wouldn't destroy the app
either.

Best,

Ziya