dijit.layout.ContentPane loading and error images

[mumme]

I mailconversated with Bill and he told me to file this bug and assign it to you.

I think it would be nice to get away from the ugly 'Loading...' string and use some kind of rotating image. That would also mean we don't have to i18n that string.

ContentPane? also has a 'Sorry, but an error occurred' string that displays when something goes wrong. Like download error or when some other error occurs such as new content has bad html and triggers DOM faults.

[Adam Peller]

This is probably the only thing in dijit that isn't localized, so it would be really good to get for 0.9. Torrey, any advice?

[itorrey]

Perhaps we can create a spinner at ​http://ajaxload.info/ ?

[Adam Peller]

I think we need original artwork contributed under CLA, etc. Where would we place it? Center? Corner? How about the error indicator? I do think we have to make that graphical as well. Putting an English string on the page, even in an unanticipated error condition, would be bad. We could put some sort of 'X' up and dump a message to the console in English, I suppose.

[bill]

Let's do a proper job of this in 1.0. There are loading messages in ContentPane? (and it's descendants), and maybe Tree.

[Adam Peller]

given that no one has an idea how to do this properly, I'm going to localize the strings we've got for 0.9 and hope someone can think of something prettier later.

[Adam Peller]

(In [10176]) Pull out strings for localization. Fixes #3776

[bill]

Checkin comment should have said "refs #3776", not fixes, since we haven't added images yet. Not sure if we want to do that though, but in any case definitely not for 0.9.

[Adam Peller]

ok, this now touches so many widgets (e.g. Dialog, Accordion...), and within an hour of the release, I got complaints from two users that nls resources are being pulled in for builds where they really weren't expected. Let's try to address this for 1.0.

[mumme]

A example of a loader image (from ajaxload.info)

[mumme]

Example of a error image

[mumme]

I'm not saying we should use these images, we shouldn't/can't, I grabbed the load image from ajaxload.info, they are just examples.

[owen]

A loading image from Zimbra that we can use (CCLA on file).

[owen]

I'm not sure what to say here. We can put up an image on load, sure, but some explanatory text seems called for. Especially on error, you'd expect to see some sort of text message.

Can we leverage a CDN to pull messages in over the web, rather than requiring them to be part of a build? Or just bake many translations for "error loading page" into the source file and allow the user to override.

Adam, I'm afraid I don't have any great wisdom for you in this. If you have something concrete that you'd like worked up (like a particular graphic, etc) let me know. I've uploaded a graphic which we use at Zimbra for loading, which we can get permission to use (let me know if you want it and I'll double-check, but they've already given a blanket approval for this sort of thing).

[Adam Peller]

Hmmm. Ok. We can leverage the CDN now. The i18n loading feature works with builds or CDN. It just pulls in that much more weight (dependency-wise, but only for a few tiny strings) to a class that is quickly becoming used as a baseclass in many of our widgets, and we've been able to keep most of the base widgets otherwise neutral.

As for error messages, the string we currently use, something like "Error", isn't all that much more descriptive than the graphic. It just tells you there was an error state, which I think a graphic could convey. Any additional text would be passed along untranslated from the server, whether we use a graphic or a string in our code to represent the condition. I'm not sure how it makes the most sense to convey this to the user -- or whether to hide the details by default and let some additional user action or programmer action bring it out.

But, if the string is necessary, so be it. If you think adding a graphic enhances the experience, that's ok, too, otherwise I guess we close this as a won't fix?

[Adam Peller]

From today's dijit meeting -

I was reminded that there's basically no way around this for a11y. We need the strings.

Only question remaining is whether it would be more pleasant to have graphical symbols for non-disabled folks -- we still incur the hit of i18n. The consensus was yes. dante has generously offered to take this on for 1.1. We should use consistent UI for other widgets requiring loading/error status (e.g. Tree) unless they choose to use a cursor.

For error, I like a broken page sort of graphic, which seems consistent with how the browser treats broken images.

[dante]

(In [10684]) fixes #3776 - adds icon to loading and error states for contentpane, and things that use contentpane and get a Loading ... message.

[dante]

(In [10688]) doc cleanup reflecting a) usages of examples: param being picked up by doc parser and b) the addition of loading icons and the agreement to use i18n anyway refs #3776