What is the feature called that triggers a confirm box when you leave a page before saving?
This is the message in FireFox:
“This page is asking you to confirm that you want to leave - data you have entered may not be saved.”
I wrote a script that submitted with jQuery and it kept triggering the confirm window when posting the data.
After lots of research, I discovered it was an HTML5 feature.
E
In my world, it’s called a PITA.
I would suspect this is a JS thing. I’ve not heard of it being possible with HTML alone.
Perhaps what you heard about was a feature of one of the new browser APIs (which are wrongly called “HTML5” for marketing/buzz purposes). Still, that they require JS, and they aren’t all that well supported yet, so it’s safer to use normal JS if it’s an important feature.
The issue occurred as a bug while I was writing a WordPress plugin. The message popped up when the form was submitted.
I did a side by side comparison of the page HTML before and after text was changed, and it was identical. There were no variables stored, at least not on the page. I realized it was browser related after discovering the message was different in Chrome and Firefox. I could find no documentation in the WordPress Codex, forums, or Google searches on how this works. Perhaps JavaScript communicates with the browser for information about the page.
E
It sounds like a standard browser alert (which differs in appearance from browser to browser). It’s triggered by JS, and means there’s an alert somewhere in the script on the page.
With alerts and confirms, the text is specified in the Javascript. In this case the text was different in different browsers which would indicate that the browser is generating the text. It may be triggered somewhere on the page. Unfortunately, there is tons of nested Javascript in the WordPress admin, and I couldn’t find it. The specific text also couldn’t be found anywhere in the WordPress package by my text editor.
Each browser has its own alert text, though. If you run some code like this in various browsers, you’ll get a opup message if you refresh the page, but the message is different in each browser, because each has its default message:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<script>
var myEvent = window.attachEvent || window.addEventListener;
var chkevent = window.attachEvent ? 'onbeforeunload' : 'beforeunload'; /// make IE7, IE8 compitable
myEvent(chkevent, function(e) { // For >=IE7, Chrome, Firefox
var confirmationMessage = ' '; // a space
(e || window.event).returnValue = confirmationMessage;
return confirmationMessage;
});
</script>
</head>
<body>
test
</body>
</html>
I get similar when I log out here. And also if I start a reply and decide to not post it. eg.
Firefox
Chrome
The SitePoint forums are currently not HTML5
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en" id="vbulletin_html">
so my guess is the confirm message box is in some javascript somewhere and not a feature of the mark-up
Though admittedly it does seem odd the text would vary. I wouldn’t bother writing different based on what the browser was.
It is a JavaScript old style debugging call that someone forgot to remove from their script before placing it on their site.
Alerts certainly are an old fashioned debugging tool, but surely this alert is not for debugging.
Alerts for non debugging use are even more obsolete than ones for debugging since .some browsers display extra checkboxes in alerts to aid with debugging. Using them for other purposes ceased many years ago as since then using them and having the extra checkbox display means you are making it easier for your visitors to manipulate the way your page works. For example this one that in addition to whatever the script is using it for also asks if you want to turn off JavaScript for the current page (with the checkbox generated by the browser and not able to be turned off from the script). Having them ask if you want to see further alerts or not is also common.
For non-debugging use in 2005 or later the page should be updated directly using innerHTML or DOM calls as alert etc were re-purposed at that time exclusively for debugging.
Once Firefox finally caught up with all the other browsers with a built in debugger alert etc became completely obsolete with no further use at all - any debugging alert should now be replaced with a console.log() call instead.
Some people now have alert etc completely disabled in their browser as they now serve no useful purpose whatsoever.
That’s interesting, felgall. But as in post 7 above, where it shows how even this site asks if you really want to leave the page, I’m assuming that’s purposely put in for the user and not for debugging—even if it is annoying and/or unnecessary.
Maybe it’s an IE term, but I know them by “message box”
Three types - alert - confirm - prompt
I have (and still sometimes do) use alert as a “quick and dirty” way when developing code - though I would not advocate using alert in production code.
confirm and prompt are similar but they ask for user input, not really debugging only