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As far as i know, the autofocus attribute has been introduced to help focusing an element during the page load. To focus an element after the page load, the javascript focus() method should be enough. At the moment, inserting an element into the document with the autofocus attribute specified can be used to prevent using focus(). It has the exact same behavior and it may be undesirable for some users. Ignoring the autofocus attribute after the load event (or the 'DOMContentLoaded' event) would be a good way to prevent abuse of the autofocus attribute. Note: if bug 9547 is accepted, the issue would be less important but still present.
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Rejected Change Description: no spec change Rationale: Doing this would prevent people from using autofocus in documents that load in content onload, which would be unfortunate. We should predicate the usefulness of features on whether people load content synchronously as part of the document source or asynchronously from a separate source (e.g. localStorage).