[webkit-dev] Removing DIALOG_ELEMENT for now

[James Craig]

On Aug 29, 2013, at 12:56 PM, Darin Adler <darin at apple.com> wrote:

> On Aug 29, 2013, at 12:44 PM, James Craig <jcraig at apple.com> wrote:
> 
>> I'd like to see support for @inert subtrees prioritized if <dialog> is going to be postponed.
> 
> I don’t think <dialog> is being postponed; just that no one has immediate plans to use the implementation in the tree that is not being compiled.
> 
> Which of these two do you think we should give higher priority to, though?

Not sure how to answer… @inert represents a subset of the implementation of <dialog> so I don't know how <dialog> could be prioritized *over* @inert, but it would be possible to implement @inert without finishing a complete implementation of <dialog>. 

From an accessibility perspective, we already have a dialog role (which is extremely easy for authors to implement), so the <dialog> element and convenience methods associated with it are not as high a priority. The place where most web authors fall down with regards to dialog implementation is with focus management (moving keyboard and screen reader focus into the dialog) and not hiding the background contents (preventing keyboard and AT users from tabbing through the background contents behind a "modal" dialog), and I believe @inert would solve a lot of that. There isn't a practical way to achieve this behavior now, which is why ~99.9% of web authors are doing this in a way that falls short for keyboard and screen reader users.

James