Re: time is up warnings on web pages:

Mathew,

I like your suggestion, the intent of the provision though is to provide as
much time as needed and we don't know how much time that is.  It is
concievable then that someone might not be able to do this in a certain
period of time.  The idea would be for the message to come up and the user
to have to respond and in this case, the user can respond at as long an
interval as necessary and still have an active session.  So in effect, what
we have is a question.  "Do you need more time"" sitting there waiting for
an answer.  This puts the session in to sort of park mode meeting security
needs but not disallowing individuals who have time issues from dealing with
the site.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Matthew Smith" <matt@kbc.net.au>
To: "WAI Interest Group" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 9:25 AM
Subject: Re: time is up warnings on web pages:



Hi David

> In section 508, Provision P) calls for a warning when a session is about
to
> expire giving the user an opportunity to get more time in the session.
The
> only way I know of to deliver this warning is through js,  Are there other
> ways and how effective are they and how supported are they?

What I am about to say only applies if pages are being generated by a
script or programme:

If I were being asked to do this, I would probably use a REFRESH in the
header; this would cause the same page to re-load at a set interval,
checking on each load how much time is left.  When the critical time
were reached, I would switch on a warning message when the page is re-drawn.

Possible problems: I don't know how this would work with screen readers.

Another alternative is Server Side Push; I mention this out of interest
only because I believe that it is only supported by the Netscape browser
family.

Practical suggestion: rather than warning just before a session is about
to expire, state somewhere that "your session will expire in xxx minutes
unless you do xyz."

Cheers

M

-- 
Matthew Smith
IT Consultant - KBC, South Australia
KBC Web Site    http://www.kbc.net.au
PGP Public Key  http://gpg.mss.cx

Received on Thursday, 12 June 2003 09:40:23 UTC