* A save-as-you-write mechanism for your browser
There seems to be a growing understanding of the philosophy that PCs should be more supportive of exceptions and problems than they are and ensuring that users’ efforts in terms of data entry aren’t lost. On the Humanized blog they summed it up in a great misquote of one of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics: “A computer should not harm a user’s work, or (through inaction) allow a user’s work to come to harm.”
There seems to be a growing understanding of the philosophy that PCs should be more supportive of exceptions and problems than they are, and ensuring that users’ efforts in terms of data entry aren’t lost. On the Humanized blog they summed it up in a great misquote of one of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics: “A computer should not harm a user’s work, or (through inaction) allow a user’s work to come to harm.”
Client side tools such as Roboform (works with all browsers),and Session Manager (unfortunately only available for the Firefox browser) are a tremendous step forward.
Today I have another client side tool that ensures that you don’t loose data entered into a Web form: LiveSaver is client side JavaScript that saves every key you type into form elements that you identify into a local cookie. As you enter data the cookie is updated and if you reload the page the data for those form fields is reloaded from the cookie. Check out the demo.
This is terrific! Simple, elegant, and very useful. The documentation is minimal, but then again, the idea is simple enough that if you have a clue, not much documentation is needed – the source also makes it quite clear what is going on.
There is also a specific implementation of LiveSaver as an extension for use with Mediawiki, the foundation code for Wikipedia.
LiveSaver is free for use under the terms of a BSD-style license.
