Dialog-based UI

The way I see it, there's some flaws in autosave's UI.

When you first come to a form that has some saved data, the blue bar at the bottom of the screen will ask you if you want to view the saved data or ignore it. You may not notice the blue bar! You may just blithely go ahead and work on the form. While you do this, you may be trusting that the form is autosaving, but it is not.

Then, if you say you want to view the saved form, your old values appear, but it may not be clear that you have to click "Keep" in order to accept the saved form. You may just start blithely editing again, trusting that the form is autosaving, but it is not.

I propose a new UI, which I have implemented in this patch. It is based on jquery-ui's "dialog" method (which introduces a dependency on jquery_ui).

In this user interface, the first question -- do you want to view the saved form or ignore it? -- is presented as a modal dialog. The user must address it in some way.

The second question -- do you want to keep these values or reset the form? -- is presented as a non-modal dialog, with some more explicit instructions. The reason it is non-modal is that we use vertical tabs. Sites may also have collapsed fieldsets. The user needs to interact with the form in order to properly inspect it. But the dialog is up, and much more noticeable.

Take a look at this UI.