Suggestion: Separate overlay plugin

Suggestion: Separate overlay plugin


I've been playing with the 1.5 release candidate and am really pleased
that dialogs now have an optional modal operation state and can
generate an overlay layer.
I do have a suggestion, though. The overlay seems to be integral to
the dialog plugin, but there are circumstances where you might want
the overlay functionality in things other than dialogs. Likewise, if
you're not using the modal and overlay functionality then having the
overlay in the dialog code is a waste of bandwidth.
I'd suggest moving the overlay code into a separate module, say
ui.overlay.js, so you can use it on its own, separate from the dialog
plugin. For example, you could use it to block only portions of your
web app's GUI, the way BlockUI does. At the moment if you want the
blockign functionality you need BlockUI or similar, which strikes me
as a bit of a waste as you're basically duplicating functionality in 2
modules.
If there was a ui.overlay plugin you could still use the same syntax
with dialogs (modal: true, overlay: {}), but you could also do things
like $('#some_element').overlay () to block interaction with a named
element, or $(document).overlay () to block the entire user
interface.