alt Hacker NewsDebouncing exists for a reason. Sometimes when a button is clicked twice, you want it executed twice, sometimes you don't. Distinguishing which is better in which situation is not trivial.
At the very least, you should consider which is appropriate for which situation, what if, in your UI, for some buttons one is the obvious choice, for others it's the other, but for some it's not so clear, and both behaviours are defensible? Now you've got an inconsistent UI.
I have no good solution for this.
Replies
It’s really common for people to accidentally click a button twice. Yeah that’s what denouncing is for.
My favorite example of doing it wrong is a log in form: if the login button is clicked twice, the server would reject the login because the first click has already used up the one-time token so the user gets an error page.
But I think the biggest problem is that people either apply denouncing to all buttons in a UI (like turning it on within the framework they are using) or apply denouncing to nothing. So there really isn’t a culture for carefully considering which situations warrant which.
It seems somewhat clear to me. You want it executed twice if and only if the operation isn't idempotent. Can you give an example where you think both behaviors are equally defensible?
a button that debounces requests should be disabled until the action is complete instead, so you can only click it once until it is ready to be clicked again. debouncing button clicks is a design failure (it makes more sense for things like requests that happen during typing, where you don't want to stop the feedback)