https://susam.net/maze/wall/comfort-of-bloated-web.html

Comfort of Bloated Web

By Susam Pal on 12 Mar 2022

There is a tiny comment form application on this website to accept
comments from visitors and save them on the file system of the web
server for me to review later and publish. This form is one of the
only two things on this website that is dynamic in nature. The other
dynamic part is the subscription form. Everything on this website
other than these two things are static in nature.

Mysterious Copies 

Most of this website is made of handcrafted HTML. The blog posts and
other content files are handcrafted HTML pages. A Common Lisp program
adds common headers and footers to these pages and generates the HTML
pages that are served as static files via Nginx. The comment form,
however, is a dynamic web application served via another Common Lisp
program that makes use of the Hunchentoot web server to serve the
form, accept the input submitted by the user, and then process it.
This comment form is a very simple application that fulfills the
modest requirements of this modest website pretty well.

However, often I see multiple copies of the same comment being saved
on my web server. In the initial days of encountering this issue, I
felt quite confused. I could rule out a bug in my program by
carefully reviewing and testing it. Further, the web server logs
clearly showed multiple POST requests being received by it from the
same client usually with a few seconds of intervals between the
consecutive requests. The comments seemed to have legitimate content.
Since the duplicate copies would all have the same comment, I would
arbitrarily pick one and publish it on my website. But I often
wondered why on earth well meaning visitors would sometimes submit
the same comment multiple times. For good measure? Perhaps! But still
quite odd!

So What's the Problem? 

The mystery of duplicate comment submission remained a puzzle for
several months. Then one day, one of the visitors to my website
contacted me via Twitter messages to tell me that my comment form was
broken and it was not working for him.

The conversation began like this: "Hey! The comment form on your
website seems to be broken. It says it has accepted my comment but I
don't think it is doing that."

I responded, "Hi! Thank you for contacting me about this issue. What
do you mean it does not accept your comment? Do you see an error?"

"There is no error. In fact, after submitting, I get a success
message that says, 'Comment was submitted successfully. It may be
published after review.'"

"That sounds about right. So what's the problem?"

In the meantime, I performed some testing at my end to find that the
comment form appeared to be working fine with no apparent issues.
Further, I found that there were multiple copies of his comment saved
neatly on the server for me to review later and publish.

Before I could share my findings, he continued, "Well, that success
message appears almost instantly. It couldn't be storing my comment
successfully that fast, could it?"

That is when the mystery unfolded for me! The issue was that the
comment form accepts the user's comment and returns with a success
message too soon for the user to believe that it could have possibly
saved the comment. I have had a couple of other very similar
conversations since then when a visitor contacted me via email or
another means to double-check if my comment form was really working
fine. In all of these cases, they were skeptical about the success
message because it appeared much sooner than they expected.

Bloated Expectations 

To be honest, I found this experience to be quite bizarre. The
comment form on this website takes anywhere between fifty
milliseconds to a few hundred milliseconds to accept the user's
comment, save it successfully, and then display a success message to
the user. But apparently, a few hundred millseconds is too fast for
many people to be able to trust that the comment application is
actually doing its job. I presume that they have become so used to
waiting for at least a second or more for dynamic pages to load that
a web application that finishes its job in a few milliseconds appears
to be fishy.

I had one visitor to my website even say, "I really was expecting a
spinning wheel on the browser tab or some sort of progress indicator
to be assured that it is saving my comment. The instant success
message took me by surprise!" He felt nervous that his comment was
not saved and resubmitted the comment again.

As a result of these conversations, I have sometimes even wondered
whether I should add some artificial delay in the comment application
before responding with a success message to satisfy the expectations
of people who are so used to the bloated web. Of course, I am not
going to do that. That would be silly. I am going to keep the comment
form in its current shape, as uncomfortable as its quickness might be
to some users. However, I cannot help but remark that the users of
the web today have become so comfortable with the bloated web that a
simple web application that is fast and responsive makes them
nervous!

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