Re: Why modal dialogs are not movable?

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

Quoting Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>:
> On 4 April 2013 17:46, Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika yahoo com> wrote:
> > Could you give a case where the user would be hindered from doing their
> > work because the modal dialog can be moved independently of the parent
> > window?
> users tend to lose the modal dialog in the window stack, and if they
> manage to switch away from the window that is currently blocked by a
> modal dialog (because they need to look at something else, or because
> of an accidental key press) the dialog will not be attached to the
> window any more, and the application will look like it's stuck

+1 That's it.  And it happens very very frequently.

Modal dialog boxes *should* be rare, but some applications over us  
them, or do not manage there 'present stack' very well.  Coming back  
to a window always *should* re-raise the model dialog, which is pretty  
much what attachment achieves - because the application is broken if  
it doesn't do that, any many [most] don't

> usually leads to the user trying to close the application, or killing
> it, with potential loss of data. it's something that's easy to verify
> when doing user testing, regardless of the proficiency of the user.

Mostly it leads to the user being frustrated and thinking the  
application or platform "sucks".

> it also makes sense from a visual perspective: a modal dialog is
> blocking the window to which it's attached, so it should be visually
> connected to the window that spawned it.

Yes.

> there's a greater question pertaining the overall abuse of modal
> dialogs in GUI applications;

Yep.

> usually, modality is neither needed nor
> warranted, but it's not something that can be fixed outside of the
> applications themselves.

Yep.