Carefully implemented, modal dialog windows can dramatically improve a user interface. There are a number of libraries which offer such a system, but many have fundamental differences in design, or require certain external JS libraries, and finding the right one for me has proven a bit challenging.
My requirements: compatibility with JQuery, and importantly, the ability to degrade gracefully for those users who disable javascript. Unfortunately, this last point is where Thickbox, otherwise the leading candidate for JQuery, falls down.
The solution could well be iBox. Independent of all external javascript libraries, it is nevertheless lightweight (7kb compressed), works first time out of the box - no pun intended - and since it doesn’t hijack the HREF tag, it degrades as nicely as you could wish for.
http://www.ibegin.com/labs/ibox/
