[whatwg] Geolocation - Browser usability issues with regards to asking user permission

[Glenn Maynard]

On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 8:04 PM, Peter Kasting <pkasting at google.com> wrote:
> Furthermore, modal
> dialogs have other usability issues that the browser vendor may wish to
> avoid, e.g. requiring script on many different tabs to stop.

Are you thinking of how the prompt, etc. require that the UA pause
scripts?  That's only required for those old synchronous APIs.  A
modal prompt for an asynchronous API like this doesn't need to do
that.

There's also the tendency for modal dialogs to be window-modal,
locking the user from using any other tab, but the recent trend
towards tab-modal prompts solves that problem.

I don't think this is necessary, though.  A developer that wants these
requests to appear modal can simply dim out the page until the
response comes back.  That'll push attention to whatever the browser's
doing, without his having to care too much about what it is.  (If the
browser itself also dims the page, as for example Firefox and Opera's
prompt() dialogs do, then it'll dim it twice, but that's minor.)

-- 
Glenn Maynard