If you like modal dialogs, you love being annoyed and probably don’t care if you murder someone out there due to the rage that you didn’t know popped up cause of some piece of software pushing a neat looking, variable sized box with aligned text and a helper image onto your face.
Never has a modal dialog made you read itself to understand. It has always been about pressing the right button, to get back to whatever it was you wanted to do. As far as intentions of the developers, and to some extent the libraries go, they only want you to do whatever it is you wanted to do in the software’s right way. Press the right button, and maybe the software will do good to you. Press the wrong button and you’re probably doomed. Press the only button and you know you’re back to square one. If there are no buttons, then thank god for the display manager. If there is no display manager, you’re free of all annoyances.
There have been enough criticisms of modal dialogs that the Wikipedia page for the same has a section discussing it. But one hardly finds an application that does not throw a modal dialog on your face for whatever it is you did wrong or it did wrong (oh the horror).
Then there came the web, claiming to do away with most modal stuff as the web GUI programming model is hardly similar to the desktop model. Designers had a great chance to rid all the flaws of ancient desktop models and implement the best usability ways there could ever be, with support of some very powerful languages and associated libraries. What got popular instead, are things similar to Lightbox.
Such elegant are the looks of a lightbox implementation (an example of modal-ness), that it makes you feel all warm inside when you see it working on your own website, the feeling you get about never having to, or having your visitors to, leave the page they are on in order to see content associated to it; and to certain extent, browse horizontally across all other associated content than just one. It began okay first, click a media and it begins a modal environment that looks like Apple’s keynote events with a spinner. People could also open the link in a new tab to view the image in their browser’s image viewer (or other). Then, people couldn’t. Someone exclaimed with great delight that their JavaScript Kung-Fu was better than others.
Its one thing to pop a modal window and darken out all other content to let it have focus. It is another thing to add a spinning animation with absolutely no information, percentage wise or other, to indicate progress. Nobody cared if the spinner were enough to let the user know content’s actually loading or not because hey, they developed it in environments where the network was blazing fast and you hardly ever saw it. Progress. They just don’t get its meaning right. Space and time are measurable quantities and with content, progress is finite and must be calculated to be called as a progress animation. Fancy circular spinning darkness is anything but fancy. Even the Flash developers of the past, present and the future understood this mostly. But not the web developers, never ever.
Has no one ever noticed how a browser or image viewers worth their salt render images? Has nobody seen the progressive rendering of image data on the screen as it gets downloaded? It might make your network feel slow, but it never lets it feel non-functional.
Plague like the Lightbox (and associated beautiful modals) must be scrubbed out of the WWW. Let my clicks pass me to another page, I don’t mind. Nobody ever minded it until someone suspected they did.
