A Better Twitter Bootstrap Modal | Hacker News Reader

A Better Twitter Bootstrap Modal

github.com

358 pointsdkroy71 comments

This is a nice modal, but I'd much rather never have a modal ever. The only time a modal should appear is if a critical error occurred that the user must know about immediately. For most cases where modals tend to get used, like on iOS "please rate us", or "we want your contact information now", I don't think it is appropriate at all.

Obviously auto-popup modals are bad, but modals are great for signup and login forms.

Modal may not be great on public websites but they are essential on web apps.

And not everything is mobile web.

Why do you think that?

It's a forcible interruption of whatever the user is doing, and the user has to interact with it before continuing. As such, it should be used only when there is something that needs attention immediately.

If it's used for collecting user info after they hit a signup button, that's marginally acceptable, but they would still be unable to, for example, scroll back up the page to double-check some info until they finished with it. So I see popups like that as a failure of design; "I didn't know where to put this, so, here. Modal."

What modals are actually used for in the majority of cases I've seen is making modal popups begging first time visitors to register for websites and similar. This task is neither urgent nor necessary (nor, in most cases, desirable) for the users. Forcing them to interact with it before the rest of the page is incredibly irritating, but that will never stop because it's more lucrative.

> As such, it should be used only when there is something that needs attention immediately.

There are a lot of times that this is the case, it's strange you'd prefer no modal at all. I make backend web apps and modals are hugely valuable. Creating/editing new objects, confirming actions, applying filters, etc etc. I'd agree they have no place in informational web sites (like your favorite news site), but the web is used for a lot more than informational websites.

But the reasons you're giving for saying "but I'd much rather never have a modal ever" are down to bad design decisions. In that sense any UI pattern could cause you the same reaction if used badly.

I don't think you can write of modals simply because you don't like how they are used in some cases.

For example, how do you feel about Pinterest using modals to expand on content?

The first that I personally have seen so far that doesn't screw up when zooming in on a mobile device (actually resizes and re-positions itself), so great job! I'm sure there are others, but this one is now the best in my opinion solely based on that regard.

This is fantastic, I will definately be replacing my bootstrap modal code to use your library. This would be great if this got committed into bootstrap.

this isn't responsive on majority of current mobile browsers though... http://caniuse.com/css-fixed

also see my other comment with regards to patching it for abs positioning

edit: current alternative is http://fancyapps.com/fancybox/

It suffers from the same bug as the stock bootstrap modal; focus is not contained in the popup window. Press tab a few times and soon your keyboard focus is on elements on the page behind the modal.

Is there even a way to avoid that?

Not without heavy js code

Well, I actually submitted a pull-request almost a year ago but it was rejected for "complexity"...

I didn't understand that decision back then and I don't understand it today. The patch weighs in at about 100 lines which doesn't seem heavy to me. Especially when you consider that without the patch the bootstrap-"modal" is not a modal...

Anyway, here's the fixed bootstrap-modal.js for the version that was current back then:

https://gist.github.com/0d04646ab6cf4df50610

Line 23-82 is the important bit, that snippet is lifted nearly 1:1 from jquery.ui.dialog which fixed this issue ages ago. Beyond that there's only a couple lines of glue code.

Feel free to port this forward to the current version (or better-modal). Personally I've stopped using the javascript parts of bootstrap because I don't want to maintain forks for basic bugs like that.

You might want to change the language/syntax highlighting of that gist. That apostrophe on line 120...

Sorry, here's the same gist with proper syntax highlighting https://gist.github.com/bca7185d4cf0b71bd55b

Thanks for this. Currently I have a workaround by using data-tabindex instead of the standard tabindex but I've been trying to find a more robust solution to this problem so I'm going to take a look at implementing something like this.

Assuming your modal is an element lacking native focus (eg a div) and you're using jQuery:

modal.attr('tabindex','1').style('outline','0'); modal.focus();

That: 1 - enables focus on the modal div 2 - hides focus visual indicator on the modal (because it's not an interactive element, just a wrapper) 3 - sets focus on the modal

The user's next tab keypress will select the first focusable element inside the modal.

Restricting tab keypress to just elements inside the modal (ie cycling through only modal content) doesn't return significant benefit and it's a whole lot more work. It's easy for a user to error-correct by simply clicking back inside the modal, but it's hard for a developer to manage enabled/disabled states for native behavior.

"If you want to prevent the background page from scrolling (see demo for example) you must wrap the page contents in a <div class="page-container">. The reason for doing this instead of just simply setting overflow: hidden when a modal is open is to avoid having the page shift as a result of the scrollbar appearing/disappearing."

There's a solution available which avoids wrap and page shift too. Take a look at: https://github.com/atirip/bodyscrollkiller.js

"Stackable"

After checking out the live demo, I have no idea how "stacking" modals could make a good user interface.

I have found one case where it makes sense. Say you have a modal popup with an 'editor' widget in it. If that widget then needs to popup another modal for adding a link, it makes sense. Here is a screenshot of what I'm talking about...

http://www.evernote.com/shard/s178/sh/003f6b5e-0869-44af-ab9...

This is also using the bootstrap modal solution referenced in this article. Redactor is the editor widget.

That's a pretty good example, but why is description even a modal? It looks so content rich, seems like it deserves the full screen.

True, I could resize the modal to be a lot larger, but it hasn't been a big issue so far. I do like it in a modal because it allows me to enable/disable the Save button depending on if things change (although this doesn't work now that I've switched to Redactor since they don't support figuring out that info yet... feature request has been submitted). All of my UX does editing of form fields in a modal, for consistency, it is nice to keep things the same.

It's a very common pattern in desktop software (complicated config panels, for instance). I don't think that makes it "good" but at least it's well understood. It's dumb that most existing modals can't do it.

It's not dumb if it's broken. What's dumb is that current complicated desktop solutions (whichever you talk about) haven't figured out a better way.

Just because you can get away with doing something poorly, doesn't mean you should.

I think we agree, at least in principle. Bootstrap is meant to facilitate quick prototyping, though--quick prototypes for complicated flows will include sub-optimal UI.

Desktop solutions I'm talking about: anything in Windows control panel (people still use that OS, God help them), any configuration panel in Ubuntu (go modify your network settings, for example), all sorts of horrible-to-use and yet somehow magically-useful simulation/CAD programs, etc. (A common theme here is that Apple software and most software created for Macs does not have this UI pattern, because it is indeed suboptimal. The rest of the world still sees it a lot.)

I think it's a terrible UX the way it's presented, but there is definitely a use-case for the functionality.

Say you have a modal that contains a step-by-step process. Now you can load multiple modals, and dismiss them one at a time. To a user, it will look like s/he is moving through the steps.

Is this a good use? Ehh...maybe not, but it's possible. Just brainstorming here.

Maybe they can't. But it's nice that the functionality exists so that I can make that decision for myself.

It is a perfect use case for adding a newly created category to a post.

Similarly for adding any foreign key item which could be multiple levels.

Django admin does this now by opening a "new" in a different window.

You know what's really awesome about this Modal? Unlike built-in one, this one works on iPhone without issues! Long window scrolls just fine. You just made me so happy :) Definitely using in something I am currently working on. Thanks!

#1 reason I can't use websites on my phone? Modal dialogs that align themselves "in the middle" and then proceed to be unclickable...

I concur, it also works great in IE on Windows Phone.

This is pretty awesome, I'm going to be using it for sure. As the title suggests I definetly think it is much better than the standard bootstrap modal. You should try to get this implemented into bootstrap. Good work.

My wishlist

  1. Ajax loader inside the modal (load modal first)
  2. Pinterest like modal (aka modal with HTML5 history API / 
     hashchange / browser back button support)

Create feature requests for them: https://github.com/jschr/bootstrap-modal/issues

1. Should already exist. See the 'Update' button for the ajax demo. 2. Is on my list :)

pull request into upstream?

Yeah if you believe it is truly better why not try and get it built into bootstrap?

I've been using this (as well as helping give feedback on it after I developed my own and realized this one is better). This is by far a much better solution because it handles responsive resizing, z-index and smaller devices a lot better.

Issues have been opened referencing this modal and there has been no response from @mdo or @fat on it other than to say that they were working on it themselves for a future version.

It looks good, but the animation is really slow on an iPad 3

Really slow on an iMac too.

Great job man. This needs to be added to stock bootstrap.

Totally agreed, nice work man. Thanks for sharing! We'll be using this.

Great. Thanks for making it available freely. It will be very useful to build desktop application with bootstrap and node-webkit or appjs for example.

this isn't responsive and doesn't work on devices without support for fixed positioning

you might want to take a look at grabbing what you can from my project for abs positioning:

http://niftylettuce.github.com/twitter-bootstrap-jquery-plug...

Nice. I'd remove the animation though. I think that animation is just annoyance (even slight) in structures that do not require animation. That extra few fractions of a second can mean a lot. That's why on Windows or OSX I remove the animation to hide and show application windows.

Upvote for Longcat :)

It should have been longer.

I've been looking for a better modal for Bootstrap for a couple of days now, this is perfect!

Definitely prefer this to the default modal, which blacks out the screen around it. I'll have to run some tests to see if any version of IE can handle this.

Is it really worth installing an entirely new library just to achieve something a simple line of CSS could do?

    .modal-background { background:white; }

For me, Twitter Bootstrap's components have been the right tradeoff between flexibility and functionality. It doesn't have too many bells and whistles which makes it way easier to integrate into my own code.

Maybe I just haven't run in to the use cases for Bootstrap's modal that causes the pain that this fixes, but most of these "features" seem like "it would be cool if..." product cruft.

This is a drop-in replacement so that once you hit those use cases, you won't have the pain others have already felt before you. =)

I don't think it's safe to assume that a niche feature upgrade to a JS/CSS framework is inherently bug-free across browsers.

That isn't the question. The question is if jschr's modal implementation is more (or less) bug free than bootstrap's. Based on my analysis and many others, it is more bug free. Feel free to read through the issues. https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/search?q=modal

Wow. I was just having scrolling issues with Bootstrap's modal today and I couldn't find any solutions I liked. This was a godsend. Thanks.

Good stuff. You need to get this into Bootstrap.

This looks brilliant. Looks like I'll be using this for my next project (shame it wasn't released in time for my previous one)

Might just be me (FF17/Ubuntu) but it doesn't seem to be modal ... I tab around and end up on elements outside the window.

- Backwards compatible

- Responsive

- Stackable

- …

Nice. But why isn't "Accessible" in that list?

Laggy scrolling on galaxy nexus cm10

But I don't blame you, its probably just chrome 18 being ancient.

Will try it, I often need a more size flexible modal than the stock one.

This is great! Thanks for sharing!

stackable doesn't work. A doble click hides the second or next modal

y u no backbone-bootstrap-modal?

Nice job.

Submission title is accurate.

Overkill.

care to explain?

Just read the comments above.

This is sweet!

Cool stuff. Will use it on my next project!

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