19 July 2007

Meta-Bug: UI Refresh That Doesn't

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If you can read this post, you're lucky, because I think I've just edited this blog's framework into the ground!

The case was a meta-bug (i.e. a conceptual bug that underlies other bugs).  I was trying to add a poll to the blog, which was rejected due to some date format thing.  So; is "07/07/19" yy/mm/dd or mm/yy/dd?  Do my preferences for dd/mm/yy(yy) have any bearing on what the error report shows?  None of that is the bug, by the way; just bad error message design - in fact, it may be that the new Poll thing is just plain broken.

Here's the bug: If I try a different date that is also "wrong", will I be able to visually tell the difference between nothing happening when I click Save, and getting the exact same error message invisibly "refreshed" over the old one?  What happens if I ASSume that "nothing happened" and I machine-gun the dumb-ass Save button 100 times out of frustration?

Er... I wish the last question was rhetorical, heh.  I've just closed the browser window that has been "Saving..." my blog for the last unfeasibly large number of minutes.

So if you're looking at a blog layout that is currently less than fully-assed, with a dead poll that was "fished" before it was born, then you know why.

Bah!  User failure strikes again...

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