68408 - W3C CUAP: Warn users about incomplete documents and transfers

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

[ This bug is one of the recommendations in the W3C's "Common User Agent 
Problems" document, URL above. One bug has been filed on each recommendation, 
for deciding whether we do it and, if not, whether we should. ]

1.7 Warn users about incomplete documents and transfers.

     Rendering an incomplete document as though it were complete is very
     likely to confuse users. Part of the document is missing, hence some
     anchors might not be present, possibly breaking some links. The user
     agent should notify the user that the document is incomplete.

     The HTTP/1.1 specification describes this behavior for caches at the
     protocol level. Partial responses should also be made obvious to the
     user with a warning.

Comment 1

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

4.x writes something like `</>Transfer interrupted!' to the end of the document, 
but this doesn't work in the (frequent) case that the loading is stopped in the 
middle of a TABLE, since the text never appears.

Appropriate behavior would be to draw a box along the bottom of the canvas, 
containing the `note' icon (e.g. a face with a speech bubble on Mac OS, or an `i' 
in a speech bubble on Windows), with text explaining that the page was not 
complete and that this might be fixed by hitting Reload.

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

We do need a "transfer interrupted" message, which we don't have at the moment. 
Nominating for mozilla0.9.

Gerv

Comment 3

[benc]

mass move, v2.
qa to me.

Comment 4

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

moving neeti's futured bugs for triaging.

Comment 5

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

we learned from the downloader that webcompat says the protocol signals of incomplete are not accurate