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sr #110299: minor typo submits unfinished bug report

Submitter:  Dave <barx>
Submitted:  Fri 28 Aug 2020 09:33:14 AM UTC
 
Category:  Savannah trackers - bugs, tasks, etc. Priority:  5 - Normal
Severity:  3 - Normal Status:  None
Assigned to:  None Operating System:  None
Open/Closed:  Open
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Mon 05 Jul 2021 03:06:47 PM UTC, comment #4: 

Another important consideration is how undoable the action is if the wrong key is hit.  If I accidentally hit Enter while typing in a search box, submitting data before I intended, I have only to correct it and try again.  If I accidentally hit Enter on a form that submits a bug report, the incomplete report is submitted and there is no way to undo it (or correct it, in savannah's case, since text fields cannot be edited once submitted).

A single typo should not result in a malformed submission that is impossible to correct.

Dave <barx>
Mon 05 Jul 2021 01:26:34 PM UTC, comment #3: 

Hi Bob, thanks for the reply.

I'm not arguing against there being a keyboard method to submit a bug report.  I'm arguing that the Summary field is a poor place for it.

  • When tabbing through fields in order, the user gets to the Summary before the Original Submission.  How common is it that someone wants to submit a report with a populated Summary and a blank Original Submission?  Granted the former is marked as mandatory and the latter is not, but I bet the cases where the latter is intentionally left blank are exceedingly rare.
  • There is no visible indication on the page that the Summary field is tied to implicit submission.  The behavior is surprising not because users are unfamiliar with implicit submission, but because that's such an illogical place to put it that it ought to be clearly documented if that's where it is.


Implicit submission absolutely makes sense on, say, the front page of a search engine, where there is one text field and the user invariably wants to submit the data after typing it into that field.  I use that behavior all the time.  But on a page with multiple fields the user needs to fill out, it makes little sense to have implicit submission tied to a field in the middle of the page that appears before other fields that will almost certainly need to be populated.

A much more logical and intuitive place for keyboard-based submission is when the user tabs down to the Submit button, which is after all the fields a user might want to populate before submitting.

Dave <barx>
Sun 06 Sep 2020 02:17:06 AM UTC, comment #2: 

Hello,

But on the other side, not having an option for a user to fix their mistake (no matter why they made it) also leads to similar bug reports.

In "majority" of cases we can recognise that the user sends uncompleted form (e.g. empty Original submission field) and let them fix it before final submission.

Anatoly A. Kazantsev <jimcrow>
Thu 03 Sep 2020 05:34:09 AM UTC, comment #1: 

Hello Dave,

I am sorry that you were surprised by this behavior.  However frankly I am surprised that you were surprised by it!  This is the standard behavior of the web since forever.  It has always been this way for literally all of the decades of the web.  I didn't look but I would be surprised if Mosaic was not where this behavior started.  I am surprised you have not noticed this before everywhere.  It is considered important for accessibility.  It is part of the web standard.  Therefore I don't see any way that it could be disabled as a default.  Guaranteed if that behavior were disabled we would very quickly have a hundred people mad at us and a few bug submissions pointing out how we had broken the web.  It's called "implicit submission" for a search term to find more information about it.

Also, this behavior is really a behavior of your web browser on your client side.  Although I do know it is possible to break this behavior using specific HTML or Javascript on the web site side I know that the default is that web browsers are where the Enter is tasked with form submission.  Therefore if you really want to change this behavior then the way to do so is to customize your browser to prevent it.  Maybe you could find a plugin for your web browser that would allow you to disable this?

But in any case consider users with accessibility needs that prevent them from being able to see the pointer position preventing them from using the mouse at all.  Since implicit submission is required in that case it is strongly recommended.  From the HTML5 specification:

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/form-control-infrastructure.html#implicit-submission

"There are pages on the Web that are only usable if there is a way to implicitly submit forms, so user agents [browsers] are strongly encouraged to support this."

This is why all web browsers do this by default.  And having been this way forever it is really a default expected behavior.  Changing this would be like changing which side of the road cars drive upon.

Bob Proulx <rwp>
Site Administrator
Fri 28 Aug 2020 09:33:14 AM UTC, original submission:  

Hitting "return" in the Summary field of this bug tracker immediately submits the bug.

Maybe some find this a useful shortcut, but it's undocumented, unexpected, and more likely to be a typo that submits an incomplete item (e.g., http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?59030) than a legitimate submission.  At an absolute minimum, a confirmation should be required before the report is submitted; more likely, such carriage returns should be ignored altogether.

Dave <barx>

 

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