[whatwg] tabindexscope

[Ian Hickson]

On Thu, 7 Jun 2012, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
> >
> > Can you give some examples of real-world pages where the tabindex 
> > attribute has been used (with difficulty due to the lack of scoping), 
> > where nav-index is not the right solution, and where the UA following 
> > platform conventions for tab order doesn't or wouldn't end up in a 
> > good UI, that show that this feature would be useful? I'm having 
> > trouble picturing it, and the frequent references above to positioning 
> > and other CSS layout features is confusing me.
> 
> Imagine a video player with special functionality and a special tab 
> order defined (e.g. the current YouTube HTML5 player has that because 
> the logical visual layout of the control element is different from the 
> DOM order). On the video's home page you can pre-define the tab order 
> and make sure it fits with the page. But when it's embedded in another 
> Web page, and that special tab order potentially conflicts with the 
> page's tab order, since the embed code can't really know what index 
> number to start with, since you don't know anything about the page into 
> which it is embedded. I believe nav-index would have the same problem, 
> but a tabindexscope would solve the issue.

I don't think this is really a good use case for three reasons:

- You describe the intended tab order as being the visual order, which is, 
per spec, the order the UA should be using in the first place if that's 
what the platform does, not the DOM order;

- Typically a video player like this would be embedded using an <iframe>, 
which introduces a new tab order scope anyway;

- Widgets in general will in the future be designed in self-contained 
components, which should IMHO be defined as a tab order scope -- we don't 
need an attribute in HTML to support that.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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