134151 - ability to select text behind a modal window

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: DOM: Selection, enhancement)

Description

[Vadim Berezniker]

I do not know how feasable this is.
Right now if you open some kind of modal dialog you can't do anything with the
background window, which is the right behavior.

It would be nice if it still was possible to select/copy text in such windows
but nothing else.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Is this really an "All" request?  Window modality is handled quite differently 
on the different platforms, and it's likely that this is only possible for 
_some_ platforms (which ones did you have in mind?)

As a separate note, this sounds like a UI perception nightmare (you can select 
and copy but you can't select and delete or select and paste??)

Comment 2

[Vadim Berezniker]

I had Linux in mind but another person on the newsgroups was talking about this
behaviour under Windows.

Sometimes you have a modal dialog where you have to input some information.
That modal dialog is launched from some other place such as a webpage or from
mail&news while viewing a message. 
Then you want to copy some kind of information from the email/site to the dialog
but you can't do.

I agree about the UI part ... on the OSes I've used, there was never a decent
indication of modal windows. The only things that I remember are beeps to tell
you that it's inaccessible or clicking on a parent window would bring up the
child modal window.

Comment 3

[mjudge]

I am marking this wont fix since I have been dinged before on not following 
microsoft/apple apps closely enough in the past.