256524 - alert()/confirm()/prompt() should allow a help or "More Info..." link or button

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: UI Design, enhancement)

Description

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

Sometimes you want to make the alert()/confirm()/prompt() message short, but
also want to provide more information for the user when its necessary for them
to see more information. I think a good tradeoff would be to allow a help or
More Info.. button or link that would either bring up the Mozilla Firefox Help
or Mozilla Help to a page titled "Alert and Confirmation Messages", and scrolls
to the right section.

This could be provided as an additional parameter to the alert(), confirm(), and
prompt() functions that are not available to non-chrome javascript, or it can be
provided as additional functions that are not available to non-chrome javascript.

An example of when this would be useful is bug 112848 - "Does your grandmother
know what POSTDATA is?"

Comment 1

[Edward Z. Yang]

This is a request for a feature that would not be in conformance with the W3C
Document Object Module. Comments for extensions to the existing APIs should be
directed towards relevant authorities that are in charge of standardizing APIs.
Let's try not to introduce more browser-specific incompatibilities.

Comment 2

[Stephen Deken]

Actually alert/confirm/prompt are DOM 0, and are therefore not part of any formalized specification.  Mutating them in vendor-specific ways is probably OK as long as the mutation doesn't interfere with the expected behavior.

In this instance I'd recommend adding a second parameter to these functions, which would be an object that has various keys:

alert( "This document has been changed since the last time you saved it.  Do you want to save your changes?",
{ moreInfo: "http://mycoolwebsite.com/kb/DocumentChanges" } );

Making the extra parameter a hash would allow other features to be implemented on top of it (for example, changing the buttons) while still retaining backward compatibility.

So, the proposed syntax is:

alert( message [, alertObject] );

where alertObject is an object with (at least) the member 'moreInfo'.  Other members (e.g., buttonLabels, alertText, etc) could be added later.

Comment 3

[HyperHacker]

(In reply to comment #2)
Adding an extra button that opens a new window shouldn't be a problem. Making alert() take an extra parameter is a problem, however, because any code that uses it won't be compatible with any other browser.

Comment 4

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Filter "spam" on "guifeatures-nobody-20080610".