RE: A New Keyhole Type!

At 11:23 AM 8/25/2005, Frank Paris wrote:
>I certainly agree that that there is no reason that print dialogs should
>be modal. It's interesting that the Microsoft development tools make it
>much easier to make modal dialogs than modeless ones, and so laziness is
>probably a big factor in creating so many of them.

I agree.  In fact, one of the reasons why I haven't pursued the keyholes
book as aggressively as I otherwise might has been the feeling that to
really do the topic justice, I need to familiarize myself with the most
commonly used tools by developers, e.g., the Java libraries, the MS
libraries (both Win32 and .NET), the Visual Studio forms builders,
Frontpage and Dreamweaver, etc.  That's a lot of stuff to learn.  At the
same time, I don't think it's really laziness that drives people to use the
tools that are available to them.  It's quite reasonable behavior, one
that's easy to justify on the basis of productivity.  One of the things I
try to do is distinguish between keyholes that are easy to eliminate and
keyholes that are not.  Fixed-width web pages are easy to avoid.  On some
platforms (e.g., .NET), fixed-size dialogs are easy to avoid.  

Since you know and I don't, how much more work would it be for a developer
to put up a modeless print dialog under Windows?  Presumably the modal
Print dialog is available out of the box, right?

Scott