unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jeremy Nickurak <jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here's a UI experience pet peeve I'd be curious to hear some feedback about,
especially with regards to whether it's confusing/unintuitive to a regular
user:

You're in an application, maybe an email client, or an IM conversation, or
(heaven-forbid) a terminal. There's a URL you'd like to click on, that goes
to a PDF, .zip archive, or any other file that's not actually going to be
viewable in a web browser. You click it.

What should happen? It'd be nice to see the content open up in the correct
application. We have application and content preferences for this sort of
thing. We can look at mime times, in particular.

What happens? A web browser window opens, with no content, and then the WEB
BROWSER opens the http connection to the content you asked for, and then
downloads it or streams it to another application.

Is this by design? Or would it make more sense for the desktop to poke the
web server, get the mime-type of the content, and then open the relevant
app? The desktop could even download the content, and continue streaming it
to the application...

There's a catch that this requires 2 http connections, one to check the type
of the content, and then one to open it. However, I'd argue that this type
of interaction isn't going to be making so many connections that that would
be a bottleneck in any way, or even likely a noticable delay in most cases
(certainly not more than the delay of opening a web browser window). If it
was critical, the double-connection issues could be addressed with a little
clever proxy work...

Thoughts?

-- 
Jeremy Nickurak -= Email/XMPP: jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx =-