[whatwg] Fullscreen changes to support <dialog>

[Sean Hogan]

On 5/04/12 2:53 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Apr 2012, Sean Hogan wrote:
>> So the ::backdrop could be styled to not cover the whole page?
>> Could it default to a "top" layer, but optionally be given a z-index?
> The ::backdrop specifically would just be immediately below its element in
> the "top layer" stack, at least as proposed. Could you elaborate on what
> your use case is for moving it to other layers? (Ideally with examples of
> dialogs that do this in the wild -- see the wiki page on which we designed
> the<dialog>  feature -- http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Dialogs -- for the
> examples that have primarily driven the design so far.)
>
>
> On Thu, 5 Apr 2012, Sean Hogan wrote:
>> So this "top" layer prevents all user-interaction with the rest of the
>> page?
> No, that would be inherent in the<dialog>  "showModal()" behaviour.
>
>
>> If that's the case, it seems a bit inflexible. I would imagine that some
>> UI designers would like parts of the page to still be clickable - a
>> couple of examples:
>>
>> - a toggle button to show / hide the dialog (probably part of a menu-bar).
>> - a menu bar with buttons that, when activated, first dismiss the dialog
> Those sound like non-modal dialogs. Do you have any examples of modal
> dialogs on the Web that have these behaviours? As above, screenshots and
> URLs to such examples would be really helpful.

Look at my blog:

http://meekostuff.net/blog/

At the bottom is a simple site menu. If you click on the "contact" link 
it pops up a dialog with a backdrop that covers the whole page... except 
for the site menu. The dialog can be hidden by a "close" link in the 
dialog OR by clicking the "contact" link again.

The page itself is non-interactive. It's just the bottom menu that 
doesn't lose interactivity, because it has a higher z-index than the 
backdrop.

I suppose another way of achieving this with dialogs would be to make 
the site menu a dialog that has no backdrop but is always on top. I 
don't know if that's something worth considering for the spec.

Sean