Forms in modals: UX case

I will read the article, but I must say first. As a UI developer, modals have many good purposes, and make it a lot simpler to develop flows where you just need to briefly redirect focus or make a confirmation. Generating new layouts where you can correctly and efficiently draw user attention & find screen space is not always easy, so I will be interested what recommendations are given in such situations.

I feel the UI/UX guys are slowly rediscovering issues that desktop operating system like Windows and Mac solved 25 years ago. But instead of using a standard implementation everybody rolls their own version with its own of quirks.

Title is misleading. The article basically covers specific cases where modals aren't a great solution, but the title suggests they are NEVER useful. Clickbaity if you ask me.

I'm annoyed by modals on web pages (along with any excessive JS) as much as the next person, but:

> What's the difference between a dedicated page that has a link "return back to the table", and a modal that you cannot close by clicking on the overlay. And the only way to close it is by clicking the close button/icon which in fact returns you back to the table as well?

I think they tend to happen because (for whatever reason) people make SPAs, which is precisely about having everything on a single page; then opening a new one is slow (thanks to multi-megabyte JS) and contrary to the whole approach. And when you propose to avoid SPAs, it's met with "but Google does that", "that's modern", and so on.

Edit: Actually I've misinterpreted the article (and "dedicated page") and mixed up modals with SPAs, as pointed in one of the replies.

There's not reason you can't have a "dedicated page" with a back button (or even respecting the real back button) in an SPA. Modals are created by lazy designers, devs only implement them.