They call it progress

31 March 2003

I implemented a progress bar on the backend of egroats today. It’s for a number of reports that are taking quite a long time to run (like 4 or 5 seconds). It’s an animated GIF. I wonder how long before I get found out :)

- Drew McLellan

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§ Nathan Pitman: Hey drew, I did the same on a project which Pete and I worked on for Jetweb.se at Equant. It was a airline booking system written in JSP which took ages to fetch results, so we implemented a animated gif progress bar. The animation slowed down as it got nearer and nearer to 100% which seemed to work a treat, if the results popped up before it looped then the user was chuffed. :)
§ Drew: Sounds great. Mine appears in the markup above the point the big query is performed, and then there’s an onload event in the body tag that switches its visibility. The result is the progress bar shows (and keeps looping) until the page is loaded.

Maybe it’s not such a hack - after all it’s letting the user know that the page is being processed and is expected to take a few seconds.
§ mike: Microsoft have been doing it for years. You know the situation when you’re running an install... ’12 minutes left’ then 15 seconds later ’2 mins’... etc. You’d have thought by know they would have got progress bars sussed.

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About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan (@drewm) has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

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