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by bestest 762 days ago
I think you're comparing apples with grapples.

A popover is floating element that appears to display a contextual piece of information when required.

What you're mentioning is something completely different.

3 comments

> What you're mentioning is something completely different.

I think that is because the term 'Pop-up' has changed. It used to mean the opening of a new browser window, typically smaller than the host window and floating somewhere on top.

Now it means a modal form within the same window and dom.

I don't think this is often called "pop-up", mostly I see either popover or tooltip.
Maybe by developers. But the public certainly calls them pop-ups

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22newsletter%20pop%2D...

Either way those are called modals, not popovers.
I tend to use "apples to aardvarks" but now I'm not sure whether I like mine or yours better.

Shall have to alternate them for a bit and call it A/G testing.

And surely this new API will not be abused. Right?
At this point in the web's development the better question is: will this allow our abusers to do things that weren't possible before or in ways that are less blockable than before?

I think the answer is pretty clearly no to both questions, but it will allow us to simplify a lot of our code that was designed to make actually-useful popovers.

It might be, but at least the offending site can be taken care of by closing a single tab.

The part that sucked about old style popups is that they leaked into and on occasion would hijack (in the case of popup chains) your OS’ windowing system and at best make a mess of things or at worst turn your computer unusable.

It seems like the only context in which it could be abused would be if you have JS disabled but this still works? (Because of course you can do this with JS).

As CSS becomes more powerful it seems like being able to disable these powerful features, while still retaining the “document styling” features, will be important.

it doesn't allow developers to do anything they can't already do.

it does make those elements easier for adblockers to remove though, by implementing the functionality in a standard way that constrains all the related logic into one easily removable element.