At its simplest, the modal is just two html tags:
<div class="modal">
<section>
</section>
</div>
The included javascript on this page is a convenience for showing/hiding the modal, but you could plug this in to any old JS, use jQuery's .show(), or pump some client-side templates into this bad boy.
Code available on GitHub!I'd love help getting this working in the maxiumum number of browsers possible. Patches very welcome!