Best Approach to Modal Dialogs in UI

My team is in the process of prototyping an application with a rather complex UI. One common feature of the application is a number of tools which pop up above the main app and allow users to perform some complex operations.

Currently a consultant has wrote some custom code that displays the dialog and blocks the background UI. It works fairly well however we have hit bugs which have taken time to fix. Since we have had some down time we have investigated "better" ways of achieving our desired functionality. I have investigated Jquery UI and was able to establish the same functionality in about an hour. One issue I have had with Jquery UI is constraining tabbing to the dialog box displayed in IE. In IE the the tab index jumps to the background UI and I believe this issue is recognized in Jquery UI. http://bugs.jqueryui.com/ticket/3768

I was able to find a small p开发者_运维技巧lugin that fixed this issue for IE, however it broke the tab constraining in Firefox. I was able to make this work by putting a conditional IE check in my JS and only applying the plugin when the browser is IE. Under our current approach we do not handle tab constraining, however our consultant believes we can easily accomplish this.

My question is, which is the better approach, create our own custom solution or use Jquery UI + the plugin + the hack? When are IE hacks acceptable?

I'd go with jQuery UI because at least they'll maintain the library for you, and perhaps eventually release a fix for the issue you're talking about, and then you can remove the hack. Sometimes hacks are necessary. It beats having to maintain an unthoroughly tested custom library.

Writing a framework from scratch is always more difficult and time consuming than hoped because you will run into many issues that you simply cannot account for ahead of time.

That said, I would suggest creating a custom facade over the Jquery UI + the plug in + the hack. This would give you consistent API that meets your project's needs, the use of an established and well-maintained framework and hide some of the peculiarities between browsers. (IE hacks are unavoidable.)