Question

Apologies for the title, I found it hard to define my question succintly and that was the best I could do. If someone wants to edit it to add a better title then please, be my guest.

Anyway, the question. We have on our webpage the capability for users to delete something. They do this by clicking on a delete link, something that looks something like:

<a href="http://localhost/a/path/remove-thing.html?ID=42" onclick="return confirm('Are you sure you want to remove this thing?');" >Remove this thing!</a>

Now, obviously, normally when the user clicks on that link they get a javascript confirm box which asks them to confirm that they want to delete the thing. If they click cencel, the onclick event is false and so the delete doesnt happen; if they click okay then it does.

My problem is that if the user clicks on another link in the page (to anywhere), then quickly clicks on the delete link before the first page loads, the javascript never gets fired, but the thing is deleted – when they clicked on “Remove this thing!” they fired off that URL instead of the one they originally clicked. Is there a way to avoid this? Are we doing the confirm ‘wrong’? I assume it has something to do with the browser shutting off the javascript checking when you click the first link as it prepares to render a new page, but then still accepting a change in URL before the page has gone…

(This has been tested in Firefox 3.6 and confirmed a problem there. No other browsers tested yet.)

Answer 1

one way around this which would degrade a bit more gracefully would be something like:

1. create a separate confirmation page which these links send you to
2. use javascript to show the dialog, and if ‘yes’, send the user directly to the delete page

this way it works even without javascript, and should hopefully eliminate your issue

EDIT

if js will always be present, you can always have the default link be empty, and redirect the user after confirmation