PART II
Chapter 8: User Interface Design for Ajax 341
In some browsers that support custom cursors, it is also possible to include an animated
cursor. Unfortunately, as of the time of writing, this is supported only by the Internet Explorer
family of browsers. You may opt to provide an animated one along with a static fallback..requestInProgress {cursor: url("cursors/customwait.ani"),
url("cursors/customwait.cur"), wait; }In some situations, particularly if the network activity requires the user to stop
interacting with the page or a portion of the page, an overlay will be used. The overlay is
often gray and translucent to ensure they can see that they are still upon the same page.In case of needing some form or page or section modality, various page widgets may be
disabled dynamically during communication until they can be used again. For XHTML
form elements this is easily accomplished by setting the element’s disabled attribute.Finally, the developer may try to set a browser window status message to indicate
network activity.While a status message certainly seems appropriate to set, because of the abuse of this
status indicator by phishing scams, many browsers disable the JavaScript manipulation of
this feature by default thus reducing the number of people who will see this indicator.