Showing Modal windows in HTML Browsers

It had always been a challenge for web developers to show modal dialog boxes using Javascript that works across all browsers.

IE has a proprietary javascript method called 'showModalDialog', where as FireFox accepts an 'modal' attribute in the window.open function. Here's a sample code for the same:

function modalWin()
{
if (window.showModalDialog)
{window.showModalDialog("xpopupex.htm","name",
"dialogWidth:255px;dialogHeight:250px");}
else
{window.open('xpopupex.htm','name','height=255,width=250,toolbar=no,
directories=no,status=no,menubar=no,
scrollbars=no,resizable=no ,modal=yes');}
}

But there still remains one more problem. How to disable the close button in the dialog. There is no support in JS for that, hence the simple answer is that NO-it cannot be done.

But we can write our own custom dialog. An example of the same is given here:
http://javascript.about.com/library/blmodald1.htm But this involved a lot of work.

Being lazy, I was looking for a out-of-box solution and my prayers were answered - The Yahoo widget UI library. This is one of the coolest AJAX, DHTML library I have seen in years and its FREE for all use.
The Yahoo UI Library has a SimpleDialog Component that can be made modal and also the close button on the header can be disabled. Also the control is very simple to use.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/container/simpledialog/