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Bug 378995

Summary:	href command visuals - only true page transitions should look like a link
Product:	[ECD] Orion	Reporter:	Susan McCourt <susan>
Component:	Client	Assignee:	Susan McCourt <susan>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	P3	CC:	mamacdon
Version:	0.5
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	PC
OS:	Windows 7
Whiteboard:

Description Susan McCourt

2012-05-09 11:10:50 EDT

We render href commands with link color and hovering underline so the user knows that clicking the link will take them elsewhere.  The problem is that some of these href commands are actually just hash changes that are simply ajax transitions.  "switch to remote" etc.  We need a way to deal with this visually.  Since the commands are typically contributed by common code, the client doesn't know ahead of time when the transition is on page.  So the framework may need to consider the page its on when styling...

Comment 1 Mark Macdonald

2012-05-09 12:08:15 EDT

I really like having the visual distinction of the link look (for both transition and page-changing links) -- it tells me that something can be opened in a new tab. I'd be disappointed to lose that entirely, so I hope we're not proposing to style transition links the same as buttons.

Comment 2 Susan McCourt

2012-05-09 12:35:11 EDT

(In reply to comment #1)
> I really like having the visual distinction of the link look (for both
> transition and page-changing links) -- it tells me that something can be opened
> in a new tab. I'd be disappointed to lose that entirely, so I hope we're not
> proposing to style transition links the same as buttons.

good point.  Maybe we just need to consistently use the dotted line "link on page" and the full line "you are going elsewhere".  This is what we do in the navigator.

So I think the to-do here is that the command framework needs to observe whether the link remains on the page or not and then style it accordingly.  Make sense?

Comment 3 Mark Macdonald

2012-05-09 13:03:24 EDT

(In reply to comment #2)
> So I think the to-do here is that the command framework needs to observe
> whether the link remains on the page or not and then style it accordingly. 
> Make sense?

That sounds good. I didn't notice the dotted line until you pointed it out, but I like the idea.

I suppose other places that generate links (eg. the Find Files dialog -- when you're on the editor page the find results are really a bunch of page-transitions) should be consistent and do the same styling as the command framework.

Comment 4 Susan McCourt

2012-05-21 16:43:57 EDT

need to see where we end up with command styling changes first...

Comment 5 Susan McCourt

2012-06-06 18:06:03 EDT

We're not going to change this, the hope is that our page loads become fast enough that the user shouldn't have to understand the difference.  Any potential data loss should prompt for save on page transition anyway.