Javascript Warning Boxes…
by rullzer on Nov.07, 2008, under Annoying things, Linux
I’m pretty sure you all know what I’m talking about. When you are at some site and you fill in a form. Doesn’t matter what is is for. And you submit (everything you entered is OK) and a warning box pops up telling me that everything is send.
First of all why is this a Warning? I mean I know I pressed Send. And besides that if it is a waring they should provide me with contact information on how to get my submission removed.
Now apart from the warning box it could be a message telling me everything is inserted into the database. Let say they have some java script in the background that does that and once everything is inserted it gives the warning (still a warning is wrong but OK). However I checked the source of the site and guess what? All the button does is generate the pop-up after which the stuff is submitted.
Now I’m wondering why people do this? It does not look good, since it is a wrong pop-up box. It does not speed up the process. It is wasting my time. Which in general I do not like.
November 26th, 2008 on 7:34 am
Sure, alert(’whatever’) looks bad, totally disrupting the theme of a site, but that is not the main issue, I think.
Modal dialog boxes suck. Strangely against Firefox’s great pop-up blocking abilities, I was interrupted in the middle of playing one silly Flash game, and it wasn’t because of a crappy JS script, it was asking me to find the plug-ins for some Shockwave game. So, that’s one thing they have to change.
Anyway, wherever they come from, people should stop using modal boxes unless something is REALLY important and urgent and needs your full attention at the moment (I can’t think of a lot of cases, though). Subtle non-intrusive notifications seem to work better than the old-fashioned way. Come on, we can dynamically update content in a gazillion ways, there must be tons of libraries and frameworks that support those. It is not necessary to resort to the stupid alert box that gets in the way.