Matthew Raymond wrote:
Karl Pongratz wrote:
James Graham wrote:
Karl Pongratz wrote:
Matthew Raymond wrote:
Every indication is that chromeless windows are on their way out.
I would be very sad if that would happen. Its currently the only
way to keep forms out of history and to unlock them from the
back/next button.
So I would suggest to keep them and improve them rather than
removing them.
Well if you can think of an easy way to improve them so that they a)
obviously belong to the browser and b) clearly display the full
location then I'm sure UA vendors will be happy to hear from you.
Otherwise, the internet being the way it is, chromeless windows, on
the public internet at least, have a short life expectancy.
Yep, I would be very happy with this approach, to lock chromeless
windows to the user agent and to always show the full location, and
that you can't connect to another domain than of the domain from
where you opened the window. This modification shouldn't be that
difficult to implement for user agent vendors, I think... and hope.
As far as I remember the domain restriction already exists.
Did it occur to anyone that this is all hostile to the user? You
prevent the user from accessing controls for browser (buttons, menus,
et cetera). You prevent the user from going to another domain. You
block their access to an underlying window. This all smacks of "let's
control the users, because the users are stupid".
I wouldn't call users stupid, I would call web browsers stupid if they
are not capable to let the user complete a task in the most productive
and logical manner. However, I thought we are talking about web
applications, or do you want start reading your newspaper within
Dreamweaver, a Color Picker or your File Manager? Is that what you
intend :-) ?
I have no objection to avoid them if they are not really required.
Though what doing in the rare cases where you can't avoid them, I
guess Apple applications are still using modal windows in the one
or other case, and they will remain for another decade or two. Or
is it different?
It seems to me that two different issues have been conflated here:
modal windows (those which prevent their parent window from being
focused) and chromeless/navigationless windows. Whilst there are a
very few occasions in which I can see modal windows being useful I
can also imagine that they would be abused for all sorts of nasty
things (even more instrusive adverts, for example).
The case where you require modal windows may be rare, yet they are
extremely useful in those cases, I remember they are on the web
applications wish list at "Joel on software" as well,
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/oldnews/pages/June2004.html , section
Thursday, June 17, 2004.**
Yeah, but he really doesn't way why. I was hoping he'd have a use
case in there somewhere...
Are you sure you need a more detailed use case?
Yep, I am afraid that modal windows would be abused, as many other
things, though I consider some content you find on the web much more
harmful than modal windows could ever be, yet you allow authors to
publish content on the web :-).
Thinking more about it, in my case I would require the modal windows
on already opened chromeless windows, that could be a solution,
limiting the use of modal windows to already opened chromeless
windows, so that you can't open a modal window right away from a
regular web browser window, that would make it much more difficult to
abuse them. That is something I would be happy with and may cover
most use cases where modal windows are required.
Congratulations. You just reinvented <xul:dialog>. :)
Seriously, though, why not just standardize a subset of XUL
("sXUL") and use a compound document (XHTML + "sXUL"). We could make
sXUL the standard for browser extensions while we're at it.
Pardon, there isn't much I know about Mozilla XUL in detail, XUL always
sounded interesting, though as only Mozilla supports XUL ...
.
