Creating a native HTML modal consists of using the popovertarget attribute as the trigger and the popover attribute, paired with an id , to identify the content element: <!-- "popovertarget" attribute will map to "id" of popover contents --> <button popovertarget="popover-contents">Open popover</button> <div id="popover-contents" popover>This is the contents of the popover</div> /* contents of the popover */ [popover] { background: lightblue; padding: 20px; } /* the dialog's "modal" background */ [popover]:-internal-popover-in-top-layer::backdrop { background: rgba(0, 0, 0, .5); }