Change 489392 had a related patch set uploaded (by Esanders; owner: Esanders):
[mediawiki/extensions/ContentTranslation@master] Use VE read-only mode for source surface

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/489392

Change 489392 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/ContentTranslation@master] Use VE read-only mode for source surface

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/489392

In T202158, all dialogs are made to cover editing surface fully. After read-only mode became available in VE, we can inspect the content from source column. However, these inspection dialogs are displayed centered on screen, not covering editing area.

@Pginer-WMF, should we keep this difference, as viewing and editing are separated this way? One benefit of centered dialog is that we may still see the rendered content which is being inspected.

@Petar.petkovic, if you can provide a screenshot, Pau can better understand it.

Here are the screenshots for template in source and target column, displayed with focus and then with the dialog opened.

Source template focused	Dialog for source template opened

Target template focused	Dialog for target template opened

When integrating the dialogs we have been making some compromises:

• Ideally it makes sense for content to be represented in-place and side-by-side to facilitate information transfer across languages. Similarly to what we had for the CX1 template editor. Instead we are reusing the Visual Editor inspectors, which are focused on one element at a time, and require some extra steps for the user to transfer content. These are modal dialogs which cover part of the content and require to close them to interact (e.g., copy) content from the main document). Giver the number of dialogs and elements to deal with this was considered good-enough for our purpose.
• Given that dialogs show rich text in some cases, and inspectors are shown as cards in the tools column (and making an exception for dialogs to show them as popups was too complex technically), we decided to expand the dialogs to present them more like documents. This connects them better with the information in the tools column, but increases the barrier to access the document.

I think that the current status illustrated meets already the purpose of the ticket. I'll be testing this further, and creating a follow-up ticket if further adjustments are needed to make the dialogs on either side better/more consistent.