HTML 5.2: The <dialog> Element

Siderant: I cannot help it, but my inner geek has issues with the language used to control the dialog.

The attribute to indicate whether a modal is open/visible/shown or not is named open, so I’m taking that as the baseline.

Now, say you want to open a modal via JavaScript you don’t call modal.open(), but you have have to call modal.showModal(). Why not open (like the attribute) but show as the verb? And why the Modal suffix?

And now comes the even more inconsistent part: to close it, you don’t call modal.hideModal() (which is the exact opposite of modal.showModal()) nor modal.closeModal(), but modal.close().

Weird … 🤔