javascript - showModalDialog alternative?

Question

I'm managing an old site that's riddled with popup windows. They're quite annoying because they keep getting lost behind the main window. I'm slowly moving them over to over to a modern 'lightbox' but it's a slow and tedious process because all these popups contain forms and the validation is done server-side, which means I need to be able to submit the form and then re-render it if there's an error without breaking the whole page.

I just discovered there's a window.showDialogBox which works perfectly in Firefox (prevents you from clicking the main page until you close the dialog), but Chrome has already deprecated it, and IE only half supports it.

So, is there anything I can replace window.open with in the mean time to provide a better user experience, without re-writing every form to send and receive JSON via XHR?

Answer 1

You can use my showModalDialog polyfill using the brand new modal <dialog> element, which works in the latest Google Chrome. A <dialog> polyfill for older browsers is here.