[hammerdr]

I don't disagree with the premise that double clicks are a broken thing on the web. There's too much of a cognitive shift between "the web" and "everything else" where double clicks are either a bad thing to do or a required action to complete tasks. Like the author said, even tech savvy people will double click things that they wouldn't need to.

But, saying that idempotency is hard and thus we should build features to get around it.. that seems wrong to me. The web is inherently a distributed system and you're going to have concurrent requests and weird edge cases that arise in those situations. The right way to handle that isn't to bandaid it with disabling client side behavior. That just hides to problem. Your server is the place to handle it.[1]

And, it really isn't that hard either. It's just a couple extra validations on your input before you do a write. There are places where it is more difficult but still not overly complicated to implement.

[1] Dogmatism alert. Of course, there are exceptions to everything that's a 'best practice'. Here, I'm just talking about disabling double-click as a general solution for the web to a concurrency problem.