RE: Modal dialogs in HTML5

On Tue, 29 Apr 2008, Travis Leithead wrote:
>
> >> Most modality discussed so far has been about the view modality, ie
> disallowing the user from accessing the original page content until the 
> dialog has been dismissed. Browser modality may also be about not 
> letting the browser unload/reload the page until a dialog has been 
> dismissed (eg "do you want to save before closing the window?"). Is 
> there any way to force a user to respond to a modal dialog section 
> before unloading the page? If not, ideally a generic modality feature 
> could be added to assist both sections and current style HTML dialogs in 
> achieving this unload modality.
> 
> I'm not a big fan of allowing a web application to have that level of 
> control of a user's browsing experience (a web page preventing a user 
> from closing a tab, for example). The desktop paradigm is like allowing 
> a program to prevent the user from restarting or shutting down the 
> OS--seems like a bad design decision.

I totally agree. Please invent a time machine and go back to Microsoft 
about 10 years ago and tell them not to invent showModalDialog(). :-)

At this point, browsers have to support it, there's too much content out 
there that uses it.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 29 April 2008 21:18:53 UTC