#468: Review the HTML spec's treatment of focus

Visit on Github.

Opened Jan 27, 2020

There has been work recently, e.g. https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/4754, to give the HTML spec a more consistent handling of focus.

We should check what the status of that work is, whether it is being tracked in a single place, and review the work as a complete set once it's done.

Discussions

2020-11-16

Minutes

Deferred since Tess was unavailable.

2021-01-Kronos

Minutes

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.

2021-02-15

Minutes

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.

2021-05-Arakeen

Minutes

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.

2021-12-13

Minutes

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

2023-10-23

Minutes

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

2024-01-london

Minutes

reassigned to Matthew & Tess

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