Angular

Angular 18 Announced: Zoneless Change Detection and More

Published May 29, 2024

Updated May 29, 2024

3 min read

Angular 18 Announced: Zoneless Change Detection and More

Angular 18 has officially landed, and yet again, the Angular team has proven that they are listening to the community and are committed to continuing the framework's renaissance.

The release polishes existing features, addresses common developer requests, and introduces experimental zoneless change detection. Let's examine the major updates and enhancements that Angular 18 offers.

1. Zoneless Angular

One of the most exciting features of Angular 18 is the introduction of experimental support for zoneless change detection. Historically, Zone.js has been responsible for triggering Angular's change detection. However, this approach has downsides, especially regarding performance and debugging complexity. The Angular team has been working towards making Zone.js optional, and Angular 18 marks a significant milestone in this journey.

Key Features of Zoneless Angular

Hybrid Change Detection: In Angular 18, a new hybrid change detection mode is enabled by default. This mode allows Angular to listen to changes from signals and other notifications regarding changes that occur either inside an Angular zone or not. That effectively means you can write (library) code that works regardless of whether Zone.js is being used, paving the way to fully zoneless apps without compromising backward compatibility.

For new applications, Angular enables zone coalescing by default, which removes the number of change detection cycles and improves performance. For existing applications, you can enable zone coalescing by configuring your NgZone provider in bootstrapApplication:
```
bootstrapApplication(App, {
  providers: [provideZoneChangeDetection({ eventCoalescing: true })],
});
```
Experimental API for Zoneless Mode: Angular 18 introduces an experimental API to disable Zone.js entirely. This API allows developers to run applications in a fully zoneless mode, paving the way for improved performance and simpler debugging. The zoneless change detection requires an entirely new scheduler which relies on notifications from the Angular core APIs, such as ChangeDetectorRef.markForCheck (called automatically by the AsyncPipe), ComponentRef.setInput, signal updates, host listener updates, or attaching a view that was marked dirty.
Improved Composability and Interoperability: Zoneless change detection enhances composability for micro-frontends and interoperability with other frameworks. It also offers faster initial render and runtime, smaller bundle sizes, more readable stack traces, and simpler debugging.

How to Try Zoneless Angular

To experiment with zoneless change detection, you can add the provideExperimentalZonelessChangeDetection provider to your application bootstrap:

bootstrapApplication(App, {
  providers: [provideExperimentalZonelessChangeDetection()],
});

After adding the provider, remove Zone.js from your polyfills in angular.json.

You can read more about the experimental zoneless change detection in the official documentation. By the way, angular.dev is now considered the official home for Angular developers!

2. Server-side Rendering and Hydration Enhancements

A feature I'm particularly excited about is the improvements to Angular's server-side rendering (SSR) and hydration in terms of developer experience and debugging:

Enhanced DevTools Support: Angular DevTools now includes overlays and detailed error breakdowns to help visualize and debug hydration issues directly in the browser. This refreshing focus on developer experience shows that the Angular team wants to make the framework more approachable and user-friendly.
Hydration Support for Angular Material: All Angular Material components now support client hydration and are no longer skipped, which enhances performance and user experience.
Event Replay: Available in developer preview, event replay captures user interactions during SSR and replays them once the application is hydrated, ensuring a seamless user experience before complete hydration. It is powered by the same library as Google Search.
i18n Hydration Support: Up to v17, Angular skipped hydration for components with i18n blocks. From v18, hydration support for i18n blocks is in developer preview, allowing developers to use client hydration in internationalized applications.

3. Stable Material Design 3

After introducing experimental support for Material Design 3 in Angular 17, Angular 18 now includes stable support.

The key features of Material Design 3 in Angular 18 include:

Simplified Theme Styles: Based on CSS variables, the new theming styles offer more granular customization and a flexible API for applying color variants to components.
Theming Generation Schematics: Using the Ng CLI, you can generate Material 3 themes.
Sass APIs: New Sass APIs allow developers to read colors, typography, and other properties from the Material 3 theme, making it easier to create custom components.

How to use Material Design 3 in Angular 18

To use Material Design 3 in Angular 18, you can define a theme in your application's styles.scss file using the mat.defineTheme function:

@use "@angular/material" as mat;

$my-theme: mat.defineTheme(
  (
    color: (
      theme-type: light,
      primary: mat.$indigo-palette,
    ),
    typography: (
      plain-family: "Roboto",
    ),
    density: (
      scale: 1,
    ),
  )
);

Or generate a Material 3 theme using the Ng CLI:

ng generate @angular/material:m3-theme

You can then apply the theme to your application using the mat.theme mixin:

@use "@angular/material" as mat;
@use "./path/to/my-theme" as theme;

@include mat.theme($theme.$my-theme);

Head to the official guide for a more detailed guide. You'll also notice they have refreshed the docs with the new themes and further documentation.

4. Signal-Based APIs

The path to fully signal-based components includes new signal inputs, model inputs, and signal query APIs. We already wrote about them as they were in developer-preview in v17, but they have been further refined in v18. These APIs offer a type-safe, reactive way to manage state changes and interactions within components:

Signal Input API: Signal inputs allow values to be bound from parent to child components. Those values are exposed using a signal and can change during the component's life cycle.
Model Input API: Model inputs are a special input type that enables a component to propagate new values back to the parent component. That allows developers to keep the parent component in sync with the child component with two-way binding.
Signal Query API: This was a particularly requested feature from the community. The signal query APIs work the same way as ViewChild and ContentChild under the hood, but they return signals, providing more predictable timing and type safety.

5. Fallback Content For `ng-content`

A very requested feature from the community, Angular 18 introduces a new ng-content directive that allows developers to define fallback content when no content is projected into a component. This feature is particularly useful for creating reusable components with default content.

Here's an example of using the new ng-content directive. Using the following component

@Component({
  selector: "app-hello",
  template: `
    <ng-content select=".greeting">Hello </ng-content>
    <ng-content>World</ng-content>
  `,
})
export class Hello {}

like this

<app-hello><span class="greeting">Howdy</span></app-hello>

will render <span class="greeting">Howdy</span> World.

6. Other Improvements

In addition to the major updates mentioned above, Angular 18 also includes several other improvements and updates:

TypeScript 5.4: Angular 18 now supports TypeScript 5.4, which lets you take advantage of new features such as preserved narrowing in closures following last assignments.
Global Observable in Angular Forms: Angular 18 introduces a global events observable in Angular forms, which allows you to track all changes around any abstract control and its children, including the touched or dirty in a single observable. Here's an example of how you can use the global observable:
```
const control = new FormControl<string | null>(
  "initial value",
  Validators.required
); // use the global observable
control.events.subscribe((value) => {
  console.log(value);
});
```
Stable Deferrable views: Deferrable views are now stable in Angular 18.
Stable Control Flow: The built-in control flow is now stable in Angular 18! It is more performant than its predecessor. It also received improved type checking, including guardrails for certain performance-related anti-patterns.

Route Redirects as Functions: For added flexibility in managing redirects, Angular v18 now lets you use a function for redirectTo that returns a string, which allows you to create more sophisticated redirection logic based on runtime conditions. For example:

const routes: Routes = [
  { path: "home", component: HomeComponent },
  {
    path: "legacy-profile",
    redirectTo: ({ queryParams }) => {
      const errorService = inject(ErrorService);
      const profileId = queryParams["profileId"];
      if (profileId) {
        return `/profile/${profileId}`;
      } else {
        errorService.logError(
          new Error(
            "Navigation to profile page attempted without profile ID."
          )
        );
        return `/error`;
      }
    },
  },
  { path: "profile/:profileId", component: ProfileComponent },
];

Conclusion

Angular 18 is a significant release that brings many new features, enhancements, and experimental APIs to the Angular ecosystem. The introduction of zoneless change detection, improvements to server-side rendering and hydration, stable Material Design 3 support, signal-based APIs, and fallback content for ng-content are just a few of the highlights of this release.

The Angular team has again demonstrated its commitment to improving the framework's developer experience, performance, and flexibility. It also demonstrated a clear vision for Angular's future. If you're curious about what's next, you can check out the Angular roadmap.

This Dot is a consultancy dedicated to guiding companies through their modernization and digital transformation journeys. Specializing in replatforming, modernizing, and launching new initiatives, we stand out by taking true ownership of your engineering projects.

We love helping teams with projects that have missed their deadlines or helping keep your strategic digital initiatives on course. Check out our case studies and our clients that trust us with their engineering.

About the author(s)

Jan Kaiser
Software engineer passionate about everything web-related. Particularly loves Angular, SCSS, TypeScript, soccer and dachshunds
@honzikec @honzikec

Making Seamless Page Transitions with the View Transitions API

Make Seamless Page Transitions using the View Transitions API Traditionally web applications have always had a less polished experience, both functionally and visually speaking, compared to native applications on mobile and other platforms. This has been improving over the years with the introduction of new web APIs and standards. One such new API that bridges that gap is the View Transitions API. What is the View Transitions API? The View Transitions API is a new browser feature that allows developers to more easily create animated transitions between pages and views, similar to how mobile apps have transitions when navigating between pages. Adding view transitions to your application can reduce the cognitive load on your users and make the experience feel less inconsistent. One great thing about view transitions is that they can be used by both SPAs (single-page applications) and MPAs (multi-page applications) alike! Using the View Transitions API for SPAs Let’s see how we can use view transitions ourselves. We will use examples adapted from demos created by the wonderful Jake Archibald and Bramus. There are some alterations to a few of the examples to make them work with the newest version of the View Transitions API, but otherwise, they’re mostly the same. The process of getting view transitions working for SPAs is as simple as calling document.startViewTransition right before starting navigation and replacing your page’s content immediately after that. You need to make this call in your router or in an event listener that triggers your page navigation. The following is an example of how you can hook into page navigation in a vanilla JavaScript application. This example uses the Navigation API if it’s available. As of the time of writing this article only Chromium-based browsers support the Navigation API, but there is a fallback to using a click listener on link elements so that this works with Firefox and Safari. ` If you’re using a framework, then there’s probably a better way to do this specific to that framework than by using this contrived example. For example, if you are implementing usage of this API with a Next application, you may opt for something like next-view-transitions. For this article, we’re going to focus on the way this is done in vanilla JavaScript so that the fundamentals of using the API are understood. Knowing how it’s implemented in vanilla JavaScript should give you enough understanding to implement this in the framework of your choice if there isn’t already a library that does it for you. Now we have a way to know when a navigation is being requested. Using the above utility function we can start the animation and replace our content as follows: ` getMyPageContentSomehow can be any function that returns HTML. How that is implemented will depend on your application and framework of choice. If you want to run these examples on your machine, the demo repository has instructions in its README. In essence, it’s as simple as hosting an HTTP server at the root of the project and visiting localhost. No fancy build system is required! By default, a fade is done that only lasts for a moment. The animation that happens can be configured using CSS with the ::view-transition-group pseudo-element on the element you want to animate, which in our case is the entire page, and we pass in root. ` Given that the animation properties are used, you have much control over what kind of animation to do. You can change the duration and the interpolation, add keyframes and gradients, and even add image masks. You can learn more about the animation properties in CSS on MDN. Using the View Transitions API for MPAs As mentioned, view transitions also work for MPAs with no client-side routing. Setting up view transitions for MPAs is much easier than for SPAs. All you have to do is include the CSS rule on all pages where you want the animations. ` Of course, like how it works with SPAs, you can customize the animations to your heart’s content using the view transition pseudo-elements. Conclusion I hope this article helped you understand the fundamentals of using the View Transitions API. Now that most browsers support it and it’s not too difficult to add it to existing applications, it is a great time to learn how to use it. You can view a full list of examples here (made by Jake Archibald and Bramus) if you want to see how advanced the animations can get. I like the Star Wars ones especially. The README explains how to get all the examples up and running (a total of 43!)....

Aug 2, 2024

4 mins

JavaScript

How to build an AI assistant with OpenAI, Vercel AI SDK, and Ollama with Next.js

In today’s blog post, we’ll build an AI Assistant using three different AI models: Whisper and TTS from OpenAI and Llama 3.1 from Meta. While exploring AI, I wanted to try different things and create an AI assistant that works by voice. This curiosity led me to combine OpenAI’s Whisper and TTS models with Meta’s Llama 3.1 to build a voice-activated assistant. Here’s how these models will work together: * First, we’ll send our audio to the Whisper model, which will convert it from speech to text. * Next, we’ll pass that text to the Llama 3.1 model. Llama will understand the text and generate a response. * Finally, we’ll take Llama’s response and send it to the TTS model, turning the text back into speech. We’ll then stream that audio back to the client. Let’s dive in and start building this excellent AI Assistant! Getting started We will use different tools to build our assistant. To build our client side, we will use Next.js. However, you could choose whichever framework you prefer. To use our OpenAI models, we will use their TypeScript / JavaScript SDK. To use this API, we require the following environmental variable: OPENAI_API_KEY— To get this key, we need to log in to the OpenAI dashboard and find the API keys section. Here, we can generate a new key. Awesome. Now, to use our Llama 3.1 model, we will use Ollama and the Vercel AI SDK, utilizing a provider called ollama-ai-provider. Ollama will allow us to download our preferred model (we could even use a different one, like Phi) and run it locally. The Vercel SDK will facilitate its use in our Next.js project. To use Ollama, we just need to download it and choose our preferred model. For this blog post, we are going to select Llama 3.1. After installing Ollama, we can verify if it is working by opening our terminal and writing the following command: Notice that I wrote “llama3.1” because that’s my chosen model, but you should use the one you downloaded. Kicking things off It's time to kick things off by setting up our Next.js app. Let's start with this command: ` After running the command, you’ll see a few prompts to set the app's details. Let's go step by step: * Name your app. * Enable app router. The other steps are optional and entirely up to you. In my case, I also chose to use TypeScript and Tailwind CSS. Now that’s done, let’s go into our project and install the dependencies that we need to run our models: ` Building our client logic Now, our goal is to record our voice, send it to the backend, and then receive a voice response from it. To record our audio, we need to use client-side functions, which means we need to use client components. In our case, we don’t want to transform our whole page to use client capabilities and have the whole tree in the client bundle; instead, we would prefer to use Server components and import our client components to progressively enhance our application. So, let’s create a separate component that will handle the client-side logic. Inside our app folder, let's create a components folder, and here, we will be creating our component: ` Let’s go ahead and initialize our component. I went ahead and added a button with some styles in it: ` And then import it into our Page Server component: ` Now, if we run our app, we should see the following: Awesome! Now, our button doesn’t do anything, but our goal is to record our audio and send it to someplace; for that, let us create a hook that will contain our logic: ` We will use two APIs to record our voice: navigator and MediaRecorder. The navigator API will give us information about the user’s media devices like the user media audio, and the MediaRecorder will help us record the audio from it. This is how they’re going to play out together: ` Let’s explain this code step by step. First, we create two new states. The first one is for keeping track of when we are recording, and the second one stores the instance of our MediaRecorder. ` Then, we’ll create our first method, startRecording. Here, we are going to have the logic to start recording our audio. We first check if the user has media devices available thanks to the navigator API that gives us information about the browser environment of our user: If we don’t have media devices to record our audio, we just return. If they do, then let us create a stream using their audio media device. ` Finally, we go ahead and create an instance of a MediaRecorder to record this audio: ` Then we need a method to stop our recording, which will be our stopRecording. Here, we will just stop our recording in case a media recorder exists. ` We are recording our audio, but we are not storing it anywhere. Let’s add a new useEffect and ref to accomplish this. We would need a new ref, and this is where our chunks of audio data will be stored. ` In our useEffect we are going to do two main things: store those chunks in our ref, and when it stops, we are going to create a new Blob of type audio/mp3: ` It is time to wire this hook with our AudioRecorder component: ` Let’s go to the other side of the coin, the backend! Setting up our Server side We want to use our models on the server to keep things safe and run faster. Let’s create a new route and add a handler for it using route handlers from Next.js. In our App folder, let’s make an “Api” folder with the following route in it: We want to use our models on the server to keep things safe and run faster. Let’s create a new route and add a handler for it using route handlers from Next.js. In our App folder, let’s make an “Api” folder with the following route in it: ` Our route is called ‘chat’. In the route.ts file, we’ll set up our handler. Let’s start by setting up our OpenAI SDK. ` In this route, we’ll send the audio from the front end as a base64 string. Then, we’ll receive it and turn it into a Buffer object. ` It’s time to use our first model. We want to turn this audio into text and use OpenAI’s Whisper Speech-To-Text model. Whisper needs an audio file to create the text. Since we have a Buffer instead of a file, we’ll use their ‘toFile’ method to convert our audio Buffer into an audio file like this: ` Notice that we specified “mp3”. This is one of the many extensions that the Whisper model can use. You can see the full list of supported extensions here: https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/audio/createTranscription#audio-createtranscription-file Now that our file is ready, let’s pass it to Whisper! Using our OpenAI instance, this is how we will invoke our model: ` That’s it! Now, we can move on to the next step: using Llama 3.1 to interpret this text and give us an answer. We’ll use two methods for this. First, we’ll use ‘ollama’ from the ‘ollama-ai-provider’ package, which lets us use this model with our locally running Ollama. Then, we’ll use ‘generateText’ from the Vercel AI SDK to generate the text. Side note: To make our Ollama run locally, we need to write the following command in the terminal: ` ` Finally, we have our last model: TTS from OpenAI. We want to reply to our user with audio, so this model will be really helpful. It will turn our text into speech: ` The TTS model will turn our response into an audio file. We want to stream this audio back to the user like this: ` And that’s all the whole backend code! Now, back to the frontend to finish wiring everything up. Putting It All Together In our useRecordVoice.tsx hook, let's create a new method that will call our API endpoint. This method will also take the response back and play to the user the audio that we are streaming from the backend. ` Great! Now that we’re getting our streamed response, we need to handle it and play the audio back to the user. We’ll use the AudioContext API for this. This API allows us to store the audio, decode it and play it to the user once it’s ready: ` And that's it! Now the user should hear the audio response on their device. To wrap things up, let's make our app a bit nicer by adding a little loading indicator: ` Conclusion In this blog post, we saw how combining multiple AI models can help us achieve our goals. We learned to run AI models like Llama 3.1 locally and use them in our Next.js app. We also discovered how to send audio to these models and stream back a response, playing the audio back to the user. This is just one of many ways you can use AI—the possibilities are endless. AI models are amazing tools that let us create things that were once hard to achieve with such quality. Thanks for reading; now, it’s your turn to build something amazing with AI! You can find the complete demo on GitHub: AI Assistant with Whisper TTS and Ollama using Next.js...

Sep 27, 2024

8 mins

AINextJSJavaScript

Understanding the Difference Between `:focus` and `:focus-visible` in CSS

Understanding the Difference Between :focus and :focus-visible in CSS I have learned my fair share about the importance of keyboard accessibility, so I know that visual indication of the focused element is very important. But the well-known :focus pseudo-class is not always the best fit for this job. That's where :focus-visible comes in. Let's look at the differences between these two pseudo-classes and explore the best practices for using them effectively. What is the :focus Pseudo-Class? The :focus pseudo-class is a CSS selector that applies styles to any element that receives focus, regardless of how that focus was triggered. This includes focus events from keyboard navigation, mouse clicks, and touch interactions. Example Usage of :focus ` In this example, the button will display a blue outline whenever it is focused, whether the user clicks on it with a mouse, taps it on a touchscreen, or navigates to it using the keyboard. What is the :focus-visible Pseudo-Class? The :focus-visible pseudo-class is more specialized. It only applies styles to an element when the browser determines that the focus should be visible. This typically occurs when the user navigates via the keyboard or assistive technologies rather than through mouse or touch input. Example Usage of :focus-visible ` Here, the button will only show a blue outline when focused through keyboard navigation or another input method that usually requires visible focus indicators. Key Differences Between :focus and :focus-visible :focus - Behavior: Applies to any element that receives focus, regardless of the input method. - Use Cases: Ensures that all interactions with the element are visually indicated, whether by mouse, keyboard, or touch. :focus-visible - Behavior: Applies styles only when the focus should be visible, such as using a keyboard or assistive technology. - Use Cases: Ideal for scenarios where you want to provide focus indicators only to keyboard and assistive technology users while avoiding unnecessary outlines for mouse and touch users, typically required by design. Accessibility Implications :focus - Pros: - Guarantees that all users can see when an element is focused, which is critical for accessibility. - Cons: - Can lead to a suboptimal experience for mouse users, as focus styles may appear unnecessarily during mouse interactions. :focus-visible - Pros: - Enhances user experience by showing focus indicators only when necessary, thus keeping the interface clean for mouse and touch users. - Tailors the experience for keyboard and assistive technology users, providing them with clear visual cues. - Cons: - Additional considerations may be required to ensure that focus indicators are not accidentally omitted, especially in older browsers that do not support :focus-visible. - There may be cases where you want to show focus indicators for all users, regardless of input method. Best Practices for Using :focus and :focus-visible To achieve the best accessibility and user experience, combining both :focus and :focus-visible in your CSS is often a good idea. Combining :focus and :focus-visible ` Here is a Stackblitz example of what such styling could look like for you to try out and play with. Additional Tips - Test with Keyboard and Assistive Technology: Ensure that your web application is navigable using a keyboard (Tab, Shift + Tab, etc.) and that focus indicators are visible for those who rely on them. It's never a bad idea to include accessibility testing in your e2e testing suite. - Provide Clear Focus Indicators: Make sure that focus indicators are prominent and easy to see. A subtle or hard-to-spot focus indicator can severely impact accessibility for users who rely on keyboard navigation. Conclusion The :focus-visible pseudo-class offers a more refined way to manage focus indicators, improving accessibility and user experience, particularly for keyboard and assistive technology users. By understanding the differences between :focus and :focus-visible, and applying best practices in your CSS, you can create more accessible and user-friendly web applications. Remember, accessibility should never be an afterthought. By thoughtfully applying focus styles, you ensure that all users, regardless of how they interact with your site, can easily navigate and interact....

Nov 8, 2024

3 mins

AccessibilityCSSPlaywright

The HTML Dialog Element: Enhancing Accessibility and Ease of Use

The HTML Dialog Element: Enhancing Accessibility and Ease of Use Dialogs are a common component added to applications, whether on the web or in native applications. Traditionally there has not been a standard way of implementing these on the web, resulting in many ad-hoc implementations that don’t act consistently across different web applications. Often, commonly expected features are missing from dialogs due to the complexity of implementing them. However, web browsers now offer a standard dialog element. Why use the dialog element? The native dialog element streamlines the implementation of dialogs, modals, and other kinds of non-modal dialogs. It does this by implementing many of the features needed by dialogs for you that are already baked into the browser. This is helpful as it reduces the burden on the developer when making their applications accessible by ensuring that user expectations concerning interaction are met, and it can also potentially simplify the implementation of dialogs in general. Basic usage Adding a dialog using the new tag can be achieved with just a few lines of code. ` However, adding the dialog alone won’t do anything to the page. It will show up only once you call the .showModal() method against it. ` Then if you want to close it you can call the .close() method on the dialog, or press the escape key to close it, just like most other modals work. Also, note how a backdrop appears that darkens the rest of the page and prevents you from interacting with it. Neat! Accessibility and focus management Correctly handling focus is important when making your web applications accessible to all users. Typically you have to move the current focus to the active dialog when showing them, but with the dialog element that’s done for you. By default, the focus will be set on the first focusable element in the dialog. You can optionally change which element receives focus first by setting the autofocus attribute on the element you want the focus to start on, as seen in the previous example where that attribute was added to the close element. Using the .showModal() method to open the dialog also implicitly adds the dialog ARIA role to the dialog element. This helps screen readers understand that a modal has appeared and the screen so it can act accordingly. Adding forms to dialogs Forms can also be added to dialogs, and there’s even a special method value for them. If you add a element with the method set to dialog then the form will have some different behaviors that differ from the standard get and post form methods. First off, no external HTTP request will be made with this new method. What will happen instead is that when the form gets submitted, the returnValue property on the form element will be set to the value of the submit button in the form. So given this example form: ` The form element with the example-form id will have its returnValue set to Submit. In addition to that, the dialog will close immediately after the submit event is done being handled, though not before automatic form validation is done. If this fails then the invalid event will be emitted. You may have already noticed one caveat to all of this. You might not want the form to close automatically when the submit handler is done running. If you perform an asynchronous request with an API or server you may want to wait for a response and show any errors that occur before dismissing the dialog. In this case, you can call event.preventDefault() in the submit event listener like so: ` Once your desired response comes back from the server, you can close it manually by using the .close() method on the dialog. Enhancing the backdrop The backdrop behind the dialog is a mostly translucent gray background by default. However, that backdrop is fully customizable using the ::backdrop pseudo-element. With it, you can set a background-color to any value you want, including gradients, images, etc. You may also want to make clicking the backdrop dismiss the modal, as this is a commonly implemented feature of them. By default, the <dialog> element doesn’t do this for us. There are a couple of changes that we can make to the dialog to get this working. First, an event listener is needed so that we know when the user clicks away from the dialog. ` Alone this event listener looks strange. It appears to dismiss the dialog whenever the dialog is clicked, not the backdrop. That’s the opposite of what we want to do. Unfortunately, you cannot listen for a click event on the backdrop as it is considered to be part of the dialog itself. Adding this event listener by itself will effectively make clicking anywhere on the page dismiss the dialog. To correct for this we need to wrap the contents of the dialog content with another element that will effectively mask the dialog and receive the click instead. A simple element can do! ` Even this isn’t perfect though as the contents of the div may have elements with margins in them that will push the div down, resulting in clicks close to the edges of the dialog to dismiss it. This can be resolved by adding a couple of styles the the wrapping div that will make the margin stay contained within the wrapper element. The dialog element itself also has some default padding that will exacerbate this issue. ` The wrapping div can be made into an inline-block element to contain the margin, and by moving the padding from the parent dialog to the wrapper, clicks made in the padded portions of the dialog will now interact with the wrapper element instead ensuring it won’t be dismissed. Conclusion Using the dialog element offers significant advantages for creating dialogs and modals by simplifying implementation with reasonable default behavior, enhancing accessibility for users that need assistive technologies such as screen readers by using automatic ARIA role assignment, tailored support for form elements, and flexible styling options....

Oct 25, 2024

4 mins

HTMLJavaScript

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Angular 18 Announced: Zoneless Change Detection and More

Angular 18 Announced: Zoneless Change Detection and More

1. Zoneless Angular

Key Features of Zoneless Angular

How to Try Zoneless Angular

2. Server-side Rendering and Hydration Enhancements

3. Stable Material Design 3

How to use Material Design 3 in Angular 18

4. Signal-Based APIs

5. Fallback Content For `ng-content`

6. Other Improvements

Conclusion

Jan Kaiser

You might also like

Making Seamless Page Transitions with the View Transitions API

How to build an AI assistant with OpenAI, Vercel AI SDK, and Ollama with Next.js

Understanding the Difference Between `:focus` and `:focus-visible` in CSS

The HTML Dialog Element: Enhancing Accessibility and Ease of Use

Let's innovate together!

You might also like

Making Seamless Page Transitions with the View Transitions API

How to build an AI assistant with OpenAI, Vercel AI SDK, and Ollama with Next.js

Understanding the Difference Between `:focus` and `:focus-visible` in CSS

The HTML Dialog Element: Enhancing Accessibility and Ease of Use

Angular 18 Announced: Zoneless Change Detection and More

1. Zoneless Angular

Key Features of Zoneless Angular

How to Try Zoneless Angular

2. Server-side Rendering and Hydration Enhancements

3. Stable Material Design 3

How to use Material Design 3 in Angular 18

4. Signal-Based APIs

5. Fallback Content For ng-content

6. Other Improvements

Conclusion

Jan Kaiser

Making Seamless Page Transitions with the View Transitions API

How to build an AI assistant with OpenAI, Vercel AI SDK, and Ollama with Next.js

Understanding the Difference Between `:focus` and `:focus-visible` in CSS

The HTML Dialog Element: Enhancing Accessibility and Ease of Use

Let's innovate together!

Making Seamless Page Transitions with the View Transitions API

How to build an AI assistant with OpenAI, Vercel AI SDK, and Ollama with Next.js

Understanding the Difference Between `:focus` and `:focus-visible` in CSS

The HTML Dialog Element: Enhancing Accessibility and Ease of Use

5. Fallback Content For `ng-content`