[Popup] Should the hide() method be renamed to close()?

[melanierichards]

From the proposal's open questions:

Show/hide or show/close? This proposal introduces a symmetrical show/hide method pair on the proposed popup element. dialog, however, sets a precedent for a show and close method pairing. That seemed less intuitive, but perhaps the existing pattern should be followed. Alternatively, the platform could introduce hide on dialog and consider close deprecated.

This consistency feedback came up on MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers#455

[markcellus]

If close could be used, was open considered instead of show? Open/close are opposites, so they seem more intuitive than show/close imo.

[melanierichards]

Thanks @markcellus, we initially proposed show and hide along the same line of reasoning, in that they make a symmetric linguistic pair. <dialog> uses show and close, and there was interest in creating parity with <dialog> lest there be developer confusion from the inconsistencies. Summarizing the options, they are:

1. Take show and close to align with <dialog>.
2. Take a linguistic pair that makes sense together: either show/hide or open/close.
3. Optionally to (2), try and bring <dialog> in line with <popup>, and deprecate (but not remove from the platform) any language that is unaligned.

[markcellus]

Ah I see. I'd be in favor of establishing parity between dialog and popup! 👍

I dont know much about the reasoning behind why show/close was chosen for dialog implementation (I'll have to search the issues there). But it may be worth proposing that dialog be changed to open/close (if that's still possible) and then having popup follow along with that.

[una]

+1 to either show/hide or open/close for linguistic matching. No strong preference between them

[melanierichards]

Minutes for this issue seem to be missing, but from the record in IRC, resolutions were:

• RESOLVED: Name the methods show hide
• ACTION: Raise an issue on HTML to deprecate close in favor of hide for `dialog
• ACTION: Review other decisions (function syntax, open issues) we've made for consistency with show/hide

[melanierichards]

First resolution addressed in #355

[melanierichards]

Swapping out labels. We'll still need to raise an issue on HTML, but the first resolution is now merged in.

[github-actions]

There hasn't been any discussion on this issue for a while, so we're marking it as stale. If you choose to kick off the discussion again, we'll remove the 'stale' label.

[mfreed7]

The new explainer actually uses showPopup and hidePopup, but that's because those are on Element and need the "popup" context. Broadly, I think that still agrees with the resolution above.

As for raising an issue on HTML, with <dialog> now shipping in all three engines, I'm not sure how much appetite there'll be for changing the name of the method from close to hide. But I've opened this spec issue:

whatwg/html#7748

I'm going to close this issue now.

[mfreed7]

FYI, there is likely to be a decision for <dialog> to keep it as-is, with show/close. See this comment for more details, but I think it might be ok to have <div popup> not be perfectly parallel to <dialog>.