Forum OpenACS Q&A: Some potential usability issues in the preview flow of forums package

A software PM here who knows a thing or two about coding himself pointed out some issues with the preview page flow in forums. The main concerns are around back button usage and links within the text of a previewed post. Here are some data points I've collected. I have not tested with Safari.

* The back button works in Firefox over http, NOT https
* The back button works when previewing links in Firefox over https as the POST is resent when the user "backs up"
* The back button doesn't work at all in IE 6 or 7 - not from the preview screen and not from previewed links
* It's not related to TinyMCE our default wysiwyg editor; same behavior is seen with the editor disabled, in both browsers

Chatted about this with Dave B and he didn't have an immediate answer or suggestion. Things are complicated a bit by the inconsistent behavior across browsers. We tossed around the idea of saving the content in a 'preview' (i.e. invisible) state before forwarding the user to a preview screen that's GET based. This *might* help us avoid the expiring POST issue with IE. We'd have to do some testing.

Regarding the preview issue - if we cannot depend on the browser to resend the POST with the original content, how can we reliably allow the previewing of links? The user will lose their post if they click a link in the text. We could have links default to target="_new" (ideally only in preview mode). We could also render links as text but this would be confusing and frustrating as users probably *want* to test their links. If we could solve the back button problem, this might be moot, though.

Wanted throw this out there to see if anybody's run into this and/or thought about it or if I'm missing something here.

PS - yes, I do realize there is an "Edit Again" button...

In Safari 4, the back button works over http and https.
Hi Michael,

The back button thing is not easy to solve and IE users have been complaining about it for a while. Most of the browsers are reliable on this matter though, except IE of course.

Regarding links preview, what do you want to do? Check that the links are not dead or allow the user to check they're the right ones? or both?

As for the target attribute, it's allowed only in the loose and frameset DTD (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/index/attributes.html) and OpenACS is using the strict one by default, although it can be set to loose for one page if necessary. The WCAG recommend not to open new windows though -may confuse some users-, in any case the user has to be informed that the link will open a new window.

My five cents :)

Thanks for the Safari report, Miguel.

And thanks for the accessibility info, Emma. I'm not sure what the best approach is for links in preview. I checked out vBulletin (php-based forums software) to see how this stuff works in their software. Back button seemed to work fine, though I was only testing over http. I could go back and forth without issue. They code links to open in a new window by default.

Anybody feel strongly either way on this? Nobody has had any complaints about lost posts in forums? A good chunk of readers are on IE (mainly 6, some 7) here so we are particularly vulnerable to IE's quirks.