Asynchronous UIs - the future of web user interfaces
For truly trivial things like upvoting comments, fine.<p>But for sending an e-mail? Not in a million years. I want to see the spinner, and then know that it was actually <i>sent</i>, so I can close my web browser.<p>E-mails can sometimes be terribly important things.<p>If my e-mail web app always instantaneously tells me "sent!", then I never have any idea if it actually was -- how long do I have to wait to know before it tells me, "sorry, not sent after all." What if the app doesn't get back an error code, but the connection times out? What if the app doesn't implement a timeout?<p>Basically, if I don't get a real, delayed, "sent" confirmation, then I know there was a problem and can investigate or try again. But if I get an instantaneously "sent" confirmation, and then don't get a "sorry, there was a sending error" message, I can't be 100% confident that the data actually got to the server, because maybe there was a problem with triggering the error message. And since I'm a web developer, I can imagine all SORTS of scenarios that a programmer might not account for, then would prevent an error message from being displayed.