Comments on: OK or Cancel?

By: Phil Wheat

Phil Wheat — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:58:16 +0000

I always find it interesting that with most parts of tool kits, developers are very quick to roll their own functionality (thing DAC’s and such) but with something like this, everyone tends to just take the default functionality and let it ride.

I completely agree both that it’s a bar that should be raised, and that it shouldn’t take a lot of work to make the user’s experience incredibly better.

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 15:26:25 +0000

Ricky,

I couldn’t disagree more. If JavaScript can’t display reasonable confirmation dialog boxes, then we shouldn’t be using JavaScript for user interfaces. Blaming the tool for a product’s shortcomings is a cop-out. We wouldn’t let any other industry get away with it, and we shouldn’t let software developers get away with it.

I also disagree that the message was minimally confusing. I would expect something like this:

Press OK to discard this message without sending.
Press Cancel to continue editing.

There is absolutely no ambiguity there. The user knows exactly what will happen when he presses one of the buttons.

By: Ricky C.

Ricky C. — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 04:24:23 +0000

In their defense, it’s not actually possible to display a “yes/no” prompt with JavaScript. JS only provides three message box functions.
alert() displays a message and has an “ok” button.
prompt() displays a prompt and a text box for answering the prompt, and then an ok/cancel button (it returns the inputted string, or null for cancel)
and confirm(), the box that you have, shows a message and ok/cancel buttons (and returns true/false corresponding to ok/cancel).

So yes, it’s odd, but I think they worded the question so that it was minimally confusing, and I think I might have overlooked that humorous contradiction that you point out in this post. In this case, I believe the makers of the website are excused because of technical limitations.