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by quantadev 559 days ago
I also went thru a phase years ago where I also claimed all dialogs should be modeless to free up users to do "anything at any time". But the problem with "anything any time" is that your state management becomes a nightmare, because you then have to start guarding against astronomically large numbers of ways users can create invalid states, create contradictory settings, or have the content of one dialog become invalid, because of work done in some other dialog etc.

Hallmark of good design is when the user is doing one thing at a time, and the dialog flow makes intuitive sense. Often being able to jump back to a prior dialog means you can then start a NEW branch of all the dialogs you've already opened (and that's confusing). Modals simplify not only the code, but the user experience.
1 comments
zelphirkalt 558 days ago
Why would the state management get any more difficult? Any change a user would have input into a modal dialog only gets applied when that dialog is closed/done. Same can be done for any implementation using no modal dialog. You can have a "save changes" or whatever button that confirms the changes and only then they affect the state. There seems no inherent reason that it would become more complicated.
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quantadev 558 days ago
The problem comes about when closing dialogs (i.e. their state change) in random order leads to invalid state. If the user is in a process of doing something where `A` depends on `B` and `B` depends on `C`, etc, for example, you can't just let them say "I'm done with A now" (before B and C), when the flow REQUIRES input from B and C in order to be valid.

I know people can argue endlessly that no process step should ever REQUIRE input from some other step, but that's the same as saying "There's no such thing as a multi-step process" which is obviously an incorrect statement.

Like if I'm editing a new CMS record, and adding an attachment/file to it, what if I clicked "cancel" on the new record WHILE the upload Dialog is open? Sure you can rationalize your way around that, and think your way out of how that can work with modeless dialogs, but you're just creating lots of unnecessary work for yourself if you do.

Modal dialogs have been around literally forever (even before the web) because they're needed. It's a signal to the user that they MUST complete something before moving forward.

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