deleting a record

I've been working on a side project in my spare time, what little there is, and its come time to work on the UI, which is one of my favorite things to do, but one of the hardest things to get right.

Trying to decide amongst the various ways to delete something, trying to create a user experience that will be pleasant and not knock you out of your workflow. Here are the various methods I've been mulling over with lists of pro's and con's, and because I'm super nice, some javascript code that implements them.

All of the methods I'm going to go over rely on some backend handler that will be communicated with asynchronously to do the heavy lifting of performing the actual delete. The code could be simplified (in some cases greatly) by using jQuery or some other javascript framework, but in the interest of not being dependent on any particular framework, I wrote the code as straight javascript.

All the code depends on two helper methods

 
/**
 * Finds the nearest ancestor of an element with a given tag name
 * @param elem [HTML Element] element to find the ancestor for
 * @param tag [String] tag name to look up
 * @return elem [HTML Element | null] null if can't be found
 */
function get_parent(elem, tag) {
  if(elem == null || elem.tagName.toUpperCase() == tag.toUpperCase()) {
    return elem;
  }
  return get_parent(elem.parentNode, tag);
}
 
/**
 * Removes a row when given any node within the row or the row itself
 * @param row [HTML Element] row node or any child node of row node
 */
function remove_row(row) {
  row = get_parent(row, "tr");
  var parent = row.parentNode;
  parent.removeChild(row);
}

Method 1: Simple delete

Name	Age	Delete
Amy	24	delete
Matt	23	delete
Zeke	32	delete

  function simple_delete(lnk) {
    remove_row(lnk);
  }

Pros	Cons
Extremely Simple	Easy to accidentally delete something
	Very little feedback

Method 2: Confirm Delete

Name	Age	Delete
Amy	24	delete
Matt	23	delete
Zeke	32	delete

  function confirm_delete(lnk) {
    if(confirm("Really Delete?")) {
      remove_row(lnk);
    }
  }

Pros	Cons
No accidental deletes	Breaks flow
Easy cross browser implementation	Annoying, focus steal, mousing

Method 3: Double-click Delete

Name	Age	Delete
Amy	24	delete	Click again to confirm
Matt	23	delete	Click again to confirm
Zeke	32	delete	Click again to confirm

  var dblclk_delete_state = null;
  function dblclk_delete(lnk, which) {
    //Hide everything first
    for(var i = 1; i <= 3; ++i) {
      var msg = document.getElementById('dblclk_confirm_' + i);
      if(msg) {
        msg.style.display = 'none';
      }
    }
  
    if(dblclk_delete_state == which) {
      remove_row(lnk);
      //No need to clear state, but it can't hurt
      dblclk_delete_state = null;
    } else {
      dblclk_delete_state = which;
      document.getElementById('dblclk_confirm_' + which).style.display = 'block';
    }
  }

Pros	Cons
Easy deletes	Some people double-click out of habit
Confirm before delete	Double clicks avoid confirmation

Method 4: Binary Delete

Name	Age	Delete
Amy	24	delete	Really? Yes  No
Matt	23	delete	Really? Yes  No
Zeke	32	delete	Really? Yes  No

//Yes link simply calls remove_row(this)

//This function is called by the delete link and the No link
function binary_message(which) {
  var msg = document.getElementById('binary_confirm_' + which);
  if(msg) {
    if(msg.style.display == 'none') {
      msg.style.display = 'block';
    } else {
      msg.style.display = 'none'; 
    }
  }
}

Pros	Cons
No accidental deletes	Breaks flow (less)
Can be prettied up with qTip	Clicking delete after message appears should perform what action?

Method 5: Binary Modified

Name	Age	Delete
Amy	24	delete	Really? Yes  No
Matt	23	delete	Really? Yes  No
Zeke	32	delete	Really? Yes  No

  //Yes simply calls remove_row(this); like in the non-modified version

  //delete link calls this function
  function modified_open(which) {
    modified_state(which, 'block');
  }
 
  //No link calls this function
  function modified_close(which) {
    modified_state(which, 'none');
  }

  //Helper function 
  function modified_state(which, disp) {
    document.getElementById('modified_confirm_' + which).style.display = disp;
  }

Pros	Cons
No accidental deletes	Breaks flow (less)
Also can be made pretty
Better (?) delete link behavior

---

So those are the various methods I'm mulling over now, also whether a delete should remove the row or simply gray it out, should you be able to undo a delete, all kinds of questions. These have serious consequences for my application and are quite outside of the scope of this already way too long post. I think I like Method 4 or 5 the best, can't decide which. Which do you like, is there something that I missed?

Code is hacked together example code, real code will be nicer, possibly even a jQuery plugin