What high-level problem are you trying to solve?
Reduce loading time for users on very poor connections (low bandwidth, unstable, etc.) who are loading a Web Form for the first time from a form hosted on ODK Central.
Any ideas on how ODK could help you solve it?
I currently have NO IDEA how the new Web Forms are being structured with regards to loading media files, but since I do a lot of forms with media files in an area with poor internet quality, this potentially means the difference between a form loading for someone slowly, and being completely unusable/not loading at all.
If I'm remembering correctly, with Enketo, forms and all associated media are loaded up front and no part of the form is displayed until the entire form is loaded. Would it be possible to incorporate something similar to lazy loading into ODK Web Forms so that forms show up as soon as possible, even if all the media isn't loaded yet? In addition, since users are likely taking their time to answer questions in order instead of immediately scrolling down, users may not even notice media loading if they are just taking their time to answer questions.
I don't think it would be good to do a true lazy loading where media doesn't load until a user scrolls and needs it, but rather since most forms have many questions, it would make most sense to download the media in the order in which they appear on the form, AND not require ALL the media to be loaded before displaying the form.
I’ve just tried this out in Web Forms and lazy loading appears to be working exactly as you’ve described…
For this demo I cheated slightly and put a 10 second delay on the fetching of images specifically so I could slow down just the image resource request without slowing down everything else too.
That actually looks pretty good. I'll do some tests. This brings up another question, what's the easiest way to determine how much space all the media files together are taking up? I don't see anywhere in Centrals interface where that would be displayed. That would be good info to have while testing different forms. I suppose the easiest thing to do would be to have a device via odk collect to look at the folder for the form that's been downloaded.
Could this extend to editing submissions? As editing in Enketo often won't display the submitted images in my forms as it times out trying to load the many 100s-1000s of reference media, 99% of which aren't used for an individual submission.
It should already! I'm guessing you're asking for a form that has annotations which isn't yet implemented in Web Forms yet but you should still be able to opt into Web Forms and try an edit to verify how the loading behavior works.