Ajax Response Progress Backround
When a user clicks a link on a web site, they expect something to happen. That something might be loader appearing in the status bar, or the page going blank and then refreshing. Or perhaps a pop-up message appears. In any case, users are quite accustomed to some sort of action occurring when they click something—if nothing happens, they tend to get antsy and continue pressing the link, or eventually leave the site entirely.
It is not very good, then, that Ajax requests can frequently lead to some serious response time concerns. Let’s face it, when you put forth a request to a server, there is going to be some time involved with sending the request, processing it, and then sending it back the browser. Now, with basic web-based navigation, the browser has a lot of builtin features to handle said latency—features that users are quite used to. Unfortunately, those features do not apply when putting forward an Ajax-based request.
When a user clicks an Ajax-enabled link, unless the developer has coded it in themselves, nothing will occur onscreen for the user to understand that something is indeed happening. This can lead to repeated clicking and overall frustration, and it is up to us developers to take care of the situation. A decent way of handling this issue is by placing a loading image into the element toward which a request is heading. If you want to get fancy, an animated GIF loading image is even ore user-friendly, as it truly gives the user the impression that something is happening.