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Modal prompts
Overview
This document describes a proposal for gradually removing modal dialogs and prompts from the platform.
Rationale
In a tabbed browser, modal dialogs are potentially disrupting the work flow of the user as they can't interact with any other web site as long as the modal dialog is displayed.
Furthermore, implementing showModalDialog might require running a nested message loop which caused several security issues in the past.
Proposal
Callbacks
For the following modal prompts, a callback parameter is introduced
alertconfirmprompt
When these functions are invoked with a callback parameter, they return immediately (instead of blocking). The callback is invoked as soon as the modal dialog closes. For confirm and prompt, the callback takes one parameter which is set to the value to modal version would have returned.
showModalDialog
window.showModalDialog should be deprecated and removed from the platform. Web sites should use e.g. window.open instead.
Examples
window.confirm("Are you sure?", function(result) { if (result) doIt(); });
Issues
What would a reasonable plan to deprecate showModalDialog look like