[x32n23nr]

Modals are basically the fancy clone of old school javascript's alert(), and while everyone would rightfully be annoyed being "alerted" needlessly, designers have convinced themselves that it's fine to show modals frequently?

Edit: Claiming it's only designers' fault, or generalizing that all designers do that, is obviously wrong. I did not mean that. What I meant to convey (partially failed) is that examples propagate, and somehow design choices are the beginning of this propagation chain.

[pvg]

Modal dialogs are a lot older than alert(). alert() is an instance of a modal dialog, not the other way round.

[seventh-chord]

My impression from seeing old windows version (never having used anything older than vista) was that in general using an extra window instead of a separate pane inside the window was more common. As far as I can tell, the old windows explorer would pop open a new window for each opened folder. Now it seems like most programs are run in half/full-screen; They arent really treated as windows. IDEs have their own window-layout system anyways, right? (Modal) dialogs are probably more at place in a world where windows is more that just the name of the os.

[pvg]

What I was getting at is that the important thing is the concept (which is about as old as GUIs), the other stuff is implementation detail. The 'modal' part of the a modal dialog is that it takes you out of the 'modeless' interaction state where you can take one of the many UI actions available to you to a state (mode!) where you can do very few things and nothing else.

Making GUIs less modal is a similarly ancient UI design holy grail. Applications are modes hence everything from OpenDoc to the just-announced App Clips. A familiar clunky modern mode is 'native' apps vs 'apps' in browsers - a big chunk of technologies many programmers work with today are directly or indirectly related to mitigating its effects.

[gindely]

Yeah I think nowadays a lot of people think "modal" means "a dom element positioned with respect to the viewport that prevents interaction with the rest of the webpage".

The classical sense of "a collection of related controls that prevents interaction with the rest of the application (however the collection, controls and application are implemented)" is surprisingly rare now, particularly since the older sense were often called "dialogs" (and indeed, "modal" was short for "modal dialog") - intended to emphasise that this was communication between the user of the application and the developer of the application to decide how the application should behave.

Therefore, a modal dialog should be used when the communcation couldn't have happened before and cannot happen later, and the developer of the application cannot do something intelligent and allow the user to correct it later on. (For instance, just delete the thing and let them undo it - no interaction between the developer and the user actually needs to transpire.)

[reaperducer]

There were modals in Ashton-Tate's Framework back in 1984.

I think even GEOS had them.

[reaperducer]

designers have convinced themselves that it's fine to show modals frequently?

Not good designers. Bad middle-managers, who only know how to say, "Make it a pop-up!" and nothing else.

[qeternity]

I’m not sure this logic is honest. In the black and white world you posit, an alert is merely a window of information just like a browser window. Of course the devil is in the details. I don’t mind a popup if it’s for SSO but I do mind it if it shows an ad. The same goes for modals, and the differences between modals and alert() are for more significant than you give credit.