[whatwg] Scoped tabindex proposal
Simon Pieters
zcorpan at hotmail.com
Thu Aug 31 11:20:39 PDT 2006
Hi,
Currently if you want to use the tabindex to change the tab order you mostly
have to specify tabindex on all links and form controls prior to the area
you want to modify the tab order, because otherwise that area would be
before all prior elements in the tab order, which in most cases isn't
wanted. Therefore there's a need to scope tabindex somehow.
So here's an idea. A new value for the tabindex attribute, "scoped". Here's
an example:
<p>The following links should be focused in the order which the link text
indicates:
<p><a href="#">first</a>
<table tabindex="scoped">
<tr>
<td><a href="#" tabindex="1">second</a>
<td><a href="#" tabindex="3">forth</a>
<tr>
<td><a href="#" tabindex="2">third</a>
<td><a href="#" tabindex="4">fifth</a>
</table>
<p><a href="#">last</a>
The table itself is not in the tab order and is not focusable.
I'm not sure if we need another attribute or something for this instead as
.tabIndex is a long and not a DOMString. Or perhaps we could say that all
elements that have a tabindex attribute is a scoping element, so that
authors can use tabindex="-1" on the table instead.
Here's a pointer of where this (or something similar) is called for:
http://accessifyforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=6034
Regards,
Simon Pieters
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