Deferred since Tess was unavailable.

Alice: Looked at the PR on making :focus match on shadow hosts... https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/4731

... This decision seems to have been made for reasons which conflict with the priority of constituencies: it shows a confusing focus style to users in order to avoid revealing the existence of a shadow root.

... I would have liked to see an explainer of user needs and platform constraints which led to the current design, as well as a description of the current design.

... In particular, tabindex=-1 is more or less a historical accident due to some ancient behaviour in Internet Explorer, and there is no way to tell from the IDL tabIndex attribute whether an element is programmatically focusable, or not focusable.

... I started trying to explore the needs for this feature in https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/issues/762#issuecomment-692416176 and a later comment on that issue, but it would be good to have a full "focus on the web" explainer.

Skipped.

Tess: I should schedule a breakout with someone to take another look at this one with me. I'll ask for a volunteer at the plenary.

Rossen: Did another read through the issue and linked documents. The state of focus in HTML is still incomplete. As originally pointed out by Alice, we should continue/complete this review once the linked work matures.

Rossen: there's nothing easy about this issue. Deserves an entire breakout, at least one hour, between Tess and myself.

Rossen: not sure where this is going. No engagement from anyone in accessibility or DOM space. There was some initiative by rakina .. nothing from pinging people. Bigger motivation at the time was the way the different implementations were handling focus. Discrepency between trident and gecko and blink/webkit. Blink/webkit focus management was pretty consistent. Not the case with gecko and trident. Since then trident is no longer. Don't recall the differnce between gecko and blink and webkit.. the rest is trying to essentially clarify how does the focus element vs tab index vs active element internally represented and how is it exposed to the web. That's the write up that we were asking for so we can have a better explainer. We can close it.. keeping it open hasn't resulted in anything fruitful.

Peter: nice to not have this hanging over, but we could wait until spring and see if anyone new wants to move it forward

reassigned to Matthew & Tess

Both 525 & 468 assigned to TAG future discussion - added "deep thoughts" TAG

Matthe: Marcos suggested "overcome by events"... we could go with that... If we were going to do this... it would be a good idea to "focus" on specific areas or divide between us. But there has to be some sort of goal... There's a lot of new stuff coming out of OpenUI... is there guidance we should provide?

Jeffrey: I wouldn't suggest "overcome by events" ... because things haven't changed... we just haven't had time to do it... Maybe ask an a11y groupt to look at it and then we could promote into a finding?

Matthew: lots of stuff from OpenUI has come through... we don't want to invent work that doesn't need to be done. clear scope of what is needed would be good.

Jeffrey: I feel like the most likely problems are in the stuff that hasn't been touched recently... probably there are "dusty corners".. we need to look at a lot of things... not sure it's worth it.

Dan: any design principle?

Jeffrey: we could ask APA if they think there is a principle here?

Matthew: it's worth asking... the specific people in APA that do hands-on stuff in this area... I'm not sure how easy it would be to coordinate a more systematic review across html...

Dan: suggests changing the focus of the discussion to the design principles ... maybe opening up a new issue in that repo and closing this issue

Matthew: we do have access to a lot of academic research in this area... so there might be some stuff we can get from that to.

Action: Matthew to ping folks in APA.