Is there any good way to design a web page for massive data entry? Datagrids seem to be the best way to handle this type of data entry and I think a client application like Access or SQLite+Frontend would be better suited for this than the web.
Links to sites with a page for data entry would be greatly appreciated.
The important part would be to make everything keyboard-accessible, and to reduce as much as possible the wait time between records. So no clicking submit buttons and no waiting for page reloads.
All of this can be done with JavaScript. It would be especially useful to not have to wait for one record to be submitted and processed before letting the user start entering items for the next record.
There are plenty of grid entry controls for web pages available if you search for them. The issue would be making sure you don't spend 2 hours entering data and then have the network go down, I don't know whether any have automatic asynchronous persistence of the state, or if you have to roll your own.
I don't see the big difference between a data grid on a website vs. a data grid on a fat client app. Using AJAX, you can even do immediate validation and autosave in a webapp.
The main reason to do it as a webapp would be to allow many people to access the app without having to worry about deployment. The main reason not to do it as a webapp would be to avoid the somewhat more complex infrastructure (at least one additional server) and programming effort.
ajax autosave may eventually contain an answer to the implementation question.