> - Z-index has no effect in the top-layer. No need to compete for a higher z-index.
This is the kind of boring feature that can end up saving huge amounts of developer time. Z-indexing in CSS is kind of annoying and I've seen projects just detach dialogs from their normal position in the DOM entirely to get around stacking errors before. That obviously comes with its own set of problems...
There are scenarios where you're still going to have to build custom controls, but a lot of my experience making dialogs has been frustration over these kinds of boring features -- "how do I get this to display on top and lock the page without writing a bunch of extra code and worrying about of edge cases?"
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Minor question:
> - There is only one `top-layer` but it can have many children. Last opened === current element on top.
Is this true? The spec says:
> The top layer is an ordered set of elements, rendered in the order they appear in the set. The last element in the set is rendered last, and thus appears on top.
I'm still playing around with `dialog` elements, so you may well be right, I'm just having trouble finding the actual spec rules about what happens when there are multiple dialogs and they're being simultaneously manipulated.
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> - Not supported in Safari <= 15.3
Worth noting that there is a polyfill (https://github.com/GoogleChrome/dialog-polyfill), but that the polyfill comes with some fairly large limitations, specifically that they don't advise dialogs be used as children of elements with their own stacking context.
This is reasonable, but also... my first thought when I originally ran into `dialog` was "finally I can stop worrying about which of my elements create new stacking contexts!" -- so it does decrease the usefulness quite a bit.
This is the kind of boring feature that can end up saving huge amounts of developer time. Z-indexing in CSS is kind of annoying and I've seen projects just detach dialogs from their normal position in the DOM entirely to get around stacking errors before. That obviously comes with its own set of problems...
There are scenarios where you're still going to have to build custom controls, but a lot of my experience making dialogs has been frustration over these kinds of boring features -- "how do I get this to display on top and lock the page without writing a bunch of extra code and worrying about of edge cases?"
----
Minor question:
> - There is only one `top-layer` but it can have many children. Last opened === current element on top.
Is this true? The spec says:
> The top layer is an ordered set of elements, rendered in the order they appear in the set. The last element in the set is rendered last, and thus appears on top.
I'm still playing around with `dialog` elements, so you may well be right, I'm just having trouble finding the actual spec rules about what happens when there are multiple dialogs and they're being simultaneously manipulated.
----
> - Not supported in Safari <= 15.3
Worth noting that there is a polyfill (https://github.com/GoogleChrome/dialog-polyfill), but that the polyfill comes with some fairly large limitations, specifically that they don't advise dialogs be used as children of elements with their own stacking context.
This is reasonable, but also... my first thought when I originally ran into `dialog` was "finally I can stop worrying about which of my elements create new stacking contexts!" -- so it does decrease the usefulness quite a bit.