Forum Moderators: open
I have tried numerous variants on status="message" and none of these works.
Perhaps there is some other way of doing this?
Are you talking about an HTML file or something like a Word document?
There is a way of manipulating the status message:
window.status = 'Some Message';
This may be what you are looking for? You can fire it from <a>nchor's or you can write a script that sets it at the beginning of the document to whatever you want.
There is a usability concern here - many people may use the status bar to make sure that the page being loaded is actually the one they want, but it is a relatively minor issue compared to some of the other usability faux pas's out there!
For a quick test, drop the following into a big HTML page right after the <HEAD> tag:
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
defaultStatus="Please wait while loading ...";
</script>
... rest of the page ...
You can see that the status bar flashes the message briefly but then disappears as the browser app takes over. Without the app exerting its influence, the "defaultStatus" would remain until replaced by the next instruction to that widget.
BTW, here's how I usually manipulate the status:
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
function setStat(msg) { top.status=msg;return true; }
</script>
<body onload="defaultStatus='Welcome!'">
<a href="page.html" onmouseover="return setStat('This page has TOYS!')">Some Page</a>
If you had used both the "loading" defaultStatus and the "onload" defaultStatus, "loading" would have shown until the page had loaded then "onload" would replace it. But it's a moot point unless you can reach into the browser and turn off its use of the status bar widget.
I'm not a big fan of scrolling messages in the status bar, due to interruptions as described above. The browser app is a mighty powerful foe, in this case.
Forget about the status bar. It's removable, anyway.
Let's play with the TITLE! Always on and maleable.
(Note you need a spider/bot check to write a better title for search engines while allowing the "wait" message to display for humans. Also, I think you may want to set your robots instructions to "NOARCHIVE" while you test this on a production site. When you're sure you're sending the right title to the indexes, you can let them cache you again, if you want. IMHO)
<html>
<head>
<?php
if($notbot) {?>
<title>Please wait while your request is loading ...</title>
<?} else {?>
<title>Search Terms and Stuff ...</title>
<?}?>
</head>
<body onload="document.title='ToysForSale.com';defaultStatus='Welcome to the best toy site on the web!'">
Voila. I think I'll add it to a few of my own sites! :)
