Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] inert attribute (#610)

Thanks, the s&p questionnaire is now linked from the top comment.

To Lea's [question](https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/610#issuecomment-779776894), about whether this should have a mechanism for overriding inert in sub-trees:

I can't find any documentation, unfortunately, but I recall that @robdodson, @bkardell and I gave this quite a bit of thought and decided that, on balance, the inability to override was the right design.

This makes the API simple in two ways:

- Firstly, it means a straightforward boolean attribute can be used, instead of a string-based pseudo-boolean.
- Secondly, it means there's no need to define any kind of precedence or `!important` type rule to ensure that no content becomes "un-inert" when it's not supposed to. It makes it trivially easy to reason about: if something has an ancestor with `inert` set, it is inert.

Obviously, this does mean that authors who want to use this for modal UI need to keep the modal outside of the container which has `inert` on it. However, the popularity of the [polyfill](https://www.npmjs.com/package/wicg-inert) suggests that developers haven't found this to be an unreasonable burden.

There is some discussion on this topic on an [issue thread](https://github.com/WICG/inert/issues/69). In particular:

Maciej Stachowiak [wrote](https://github.com/WICG/inert/issues/69#issuecomment-489915986):

> the inability to escape `inert` from within a subtree seems like a feature not a bug

I [followed up](https://github.com/WICG/inert/issues/69#issuecomment-490276933):

> ... on my backlog of "ideas to write up as concrete proposals" is a top layer API which would explain both the "inert everything else" and the stacking behaviour of dialogs. I think those two things belong together, as the "inert everything else" behaviour is visually indicated by the combination of stacking and backdrop. It would obviously reuse the definition of "inert" used by both `<dialog>` and the `inert` attribute.

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