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Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> Even when they do arrive, they can be half baked - like dialog or details / summary - and that doesn’t help matters

How are those half-baked? No smooth transition for details/summary, maybe?

Dialog seems to work well enough with little to no javascript required:

    <dialog>
        <h3>Warning:</h3>
        ...
        <button onclick='this.closest("dialog").close()'>Dismiss</button>
    </dialog>

My personal bugbear is the date/time input - FF doesn't even show a click element for time, you have to type in the time.

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There's some quirks with the API around open vs openModal if you aren't aware of the accessibility implications you may not even realize this is the case.

Forms have some special quirks inside of a dialog.

The biggest thing though, is for the life of me I don't understand why you can't open and close a dialog without JavaScript. There's no way to do it.

> The biggest thing though, is for the life of me I don't understand why you can't open and close a dialog without JavaScript. There's no way to do it.

You can use popovers like this without JavaScript:

    <button popovertarget="some-element" popovertargetaction="show">Open</button>
    
    <div id="some-element" popover="auto">
        <button popovertarget="some-element" popovertargetaction="hide">Close</button>
    </div>

You can mark a <dialog> element as open by default with the `open` attribute, and you can close it with a button using the `dialog` form method. No JavaScript required for that either.

I don’t think there’s any way at present to open a `<dialog>` element specifically without JavaScript, but command/commandfor handles this and was recently added to the HTML specification:

https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/9841

I'm with you... would be nice to have:

   <button type="open-dialog" target="dialogId">Open Dialog</button>
   ...
   <dialog id="dialogId">
     <button type="close-dialog">Close Dialog</button>
   </dialog>

It would just make so much sense.

> I'm with you... would be nice to have:

You can do this right now already:

    // For  opening
    <button onclick='document.querySelector("#dialogId").showModal()'>Open</button>

    // For closing
    <button onclick='this.closest("dialog").close()'>Close</button>

I think the problem here is that it is impossible to actually use the result from `close()`, as it can return a status, IIRC.

> It would just make so much sense.

That way above that I propose is about as sensible as the way you propose. If there are any problems with my proposal that are solved by your proposal, I'd love to hear it.

The point was to be able to do it without JS.

I understand, but from a pragmatic viewpoint, it is no more and no less complicated to do it with `onclick` JS than it would be to do it with some other attribute.

For all practical purposes, there is no difference between the two.

I understand that the `onclick` wouldn't fire in browsers where JS is turned off, but in that case (no JS) you're going to have an awful user experience using dialogs even with builtin open/close attributes for dialogs.

it's coming: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Invoker_Com...

If you need to worry about ADA compliance (I always do, but not always paid to), this can be difficult to address.

I remember Opera, before it was bought, had the best support for html5 elements and date/time inputs were the best (along with almost all others). Sad to think that a leader in this area was sold off, and not to a buyer that cared about usability and the web the way Opera did.

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