RE: A New Keyhole Type!

At 08:30 AM 8/25/2005, Frank Paris wrote:
>Unconditionally saying modal dialogs are "bad" and putting the epithet,
>"keyhole," on them seems pedantically disconnected from reality to me.

I don't unconditionally say that modal dialogs or keyholes are bad, but I
do believe that they have disadvantages that are often not taken into
account when making design decisions.  Connecting this idea to reality
requires identifying situations where there are realistic alternatives to
modal dialogs so that developers can better weigh their options.  Offhand,
for example, it's not clear to me why a Print Dialog needs to be modal.  I
can imagine a modeless Print Dialog with a checkbox for "close
after each print request," so it'd optionally act much like a modal dialog,
without the pesky modal part.  But that's just off the top of my head.
There could well be other issues to take into consideration.

Scott