My team will soon be refactoring our modal dialogue component. Ours has a few deficiencies, needs better developer experience and documentation, is not built to our Design System component standards, and could use a resilience boost from some progressive enhancement.
For a long time the best – meaning accessible, framework-agnostic, feature-packed – modal implementations were custom. Specifically:
However with recent browser advances (especially from Safari), there’s an argument that the time has now come that we no longer need custom solutions and can go native. So we might reach for the native <dialog> HTML element.
However first I think we’d need to make an informed decision regarding our satisfaction with support, based on the updated advice in Scott O’Hara’s article Having an Open Dialog.
Additionally we should definitely be keeping one eye on proposals around the exciting new togglepopup and popup attributes which promise the holy grail of entirely HTML-powered modal dialogues with no JavaScript dependency.