suggestion: modal and modeless dialogues

suggestion: modal and modeless dialogues


With the current version of jQuery UI, the modal dialogues aren't
really modal, because you can still interact with items in the page
when the dialogue is open. The documentation claims they are modal,
but modal dialogues imply that the only thing you can interact with
while the dialogue is open is the dialogue itself. The current
behaviour is more like a modeless dialogues.
However, modeless dialogues are certainly useful, you can use them to
implement a floating tool bar, for example. So I suggest that for the
next release of UI a modal flag is added as an option to dialogues.
When not set they behave as they do now (modelessly) so as not to
break any scripts that rely on them behaving on modeless behaviour.
When the modal flag is set then something should happen to prevent the
user acting with the underlying page for the life of the dialogue, for
example in the way BlockUI does by drawing a div over the page
preventing the user clicking on anything underneath.