Hello, I'm experienced wikipedian. But when I tried VE last time I couldn't find some Cancel (editing) button. I think it's very important because of average internet users. Not everybody knows it could be canceled by clicking to Article link. Reloading is useless. So some people could be pushed to saving it.
Topic on VisualEditor/Feedback
Well, also if you use wikitext editor, there is no cancel button. I don't think that it's needed. Users can just click the "article tab" or alternatively click the cancel button in the browser.
Yes there is. There's even one on this edit window right now. There is no cancel button in the browser. That doesn't even make sense, how would the browser know what "cancel" means in this context?
Not a "button" though. Anyway, in August User:Jdforrester (WMF) commented on Bugzilla, "We just removed the Cancel button because user testing showed that it wasn't helpful. Any link out of the editor leaves the editor…"
The technicality of if it is a "button" or link is irrelevant to the user. Clicking it does a thing either-way. And quiet buttons (which the VE one was) look identical to links.
In what way is a cancel button "not helpful"? Is it deemed to be harmful in some way? I understand that it is not necessary, but that can be difficult for a new user to grasp. It is not self-evident that navigating away from the page is the way to cancel the edit, and besides, that seems to me like crashing out of a program to stop it - a bit of a kludge, not very clean, and counter-intuitive.
Apparently nobody actually used it (except me, because I cancel a lot of sandbox edits when I'm sorting out bug reports). Also, I think it was removed several weeks before anyone said anything about it. It's been gone for a couple of months, and this is only the second or third time anyone's mentioned it (except me).
Do you suppose that everyone who uses VE comes here? or even knows about this page? 2 or 3 seems quite a lot when measured against the traffic of this page. Anyway, that did not really answer my question.
I agree with SpinningSpark.
There is a Cancel link here, in the wikicode editor. And removing it is a bad idea.
There exist some other ways to cancel an edit, but these do not advertise themselves. The user has to guess them. And the user cannot be expected to guess them. Furthermore, nothing tells the user that just going away from the visual editing would cancel it. There could be draft auto-saving... Like on the Stack Exchange sites. More and more sites have draft auto-saving.
Removing the Cancel link is like removing the Off button from a hoover and saying that the user can always pull the plug !
Well, the user (in the shape of the en.wiki community) did pull the plug, largely as a result of the developers failing to listen. Despite some terrible shortcomings VE was made the default despite howls of opposition and it took a long time to get it removed. This is a shame because VE is fundamentally a great idea.
Going back to the OPs comment "some people could be pushed to saving", that was actually my reaction when the cancel button was first removed; I was thinking I'll save it then fix it in the source editor. Of course, now I know I don't need to do that, but anything that could lead an editor to save something they know full well is wrong cannot possibly be a good thing.
(Slightly off topic but possibly useful for several people, you don't need to "save then fix". The option to switch to source editing from VE retaining all changes has been arounds for months now, and in its current form you simply do this by clicking on the "other" edit tab while in VE).
I've seen a few edits on ptwiki which really look like something that they would not really intentionally save... Maybe they just didn't find a way to cancel the edit mode.
I must not have been clear in my earlier reply. If memory serves, this is the first complaint about the removal of the Cancel button on this particular page. I read a lot of pages on several wikis, and I regularly talk to people who watch other wikis. To the best of my knowledge, about three complaints (including this one) have been posted in public on all of these wikis combined. This includes the pages that are reached from inside VisualEditor, which has a "Leave feedback" item in the Help menu (the question mark with a circle around it).
This doesn't prove that nobody notices or cares. It could be that everyone saw that someone else had already posted a question about it, and decided not to bother with saying "Me, too". Problems reported by a single person—or by nobody at all—can be a serious issue. But it does suggest (not prove) that its absence isn't seriously disruptive for most people.
Well on this page an archive search finds this edit with two people supporting a cancel button and this one with another person supporting and this one could be taken as supporting too.
Ok, this is not a major end of the world issue, but I'm still not getting an answer to my question: what is positively problematic about having a cancel button. The answer seems to be that the devs think we should all learn to do it a different way because that is more in line with the way the software actually works. What we really find most convenient or intuitive does not seem to be very relevant.
It was removed because the toolbar was being too crowded. People who zoom in a lot or who have smaller screens end up with the toolbar wrapping into two (fat) lines, and it can eat half your screen real estate. The fewer items on the toolbar, the less likely this is to happen to editors.