18995 2012-09-24 22:58:23 +0000 Snippet: "The tabIndex IDL attribute must reflect the value of the tabindex content attribute. Its default value is 0 for elements that are focusable and −1 for elements that are not focusable." Comment: Default value of -1 for the tabIndex IDL attribute 2012-10-12 20:06:38 +0000 1 1 1 Unclassified WHATWG HTML unspecified Other other RESOLVED NEEDSINFO http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#negative-tabindex P3 normal Unsorted 1 contributor ian ian mike sumeet contributor oldest_to_newest 74371 0 contributor 2012-09-24 22:58:23 +0000 Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/editing.html Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#negative-tabindex Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#negative-tabindex Comment: Snippet: "The tabIndex IDL attribute must reflect the value of the tabindex content attribute. Its default value is 0 for elements that are focusable and −1 for elements that are not focusable." Comment: Default value of -1 for the tabIndex IDL attribute of non-focussable elements appears wrong because a -1 value of the content-attribute (per the spec.) causes the tabindex focus flag to be set which should cause the element to be focussable if it was being rendered. In this situation the IDL value would have to reflect the content-attribute -1 even while the element was focussable. Posted from: 24.4.130.88 User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/21.0.1180.89 Safari/537.1 76125 1 ian 2012-10-12 17:44:17 +0000 What would you suggest it return instead? What do browsers do? 76160 2 sumeet 2012-10-12 20:06:38 +0000 Hello Ian, Ah, I realize that you are trying to document what is actually happening the browsers and not necessarily how things should be. After your comment I checked the value of tabIndex on div elements (I verified that they didn't have a tabIndex attribute on them) on the 4 browsers and here's what I found: 1. Chrome (22) : tabIndex = -1. 2. Safari (5.15): tabIndex = -1 3. Firefox (12.0): tabindex = -1 4. IE (19): tabIndex = 0 !! So except for IE 9 the other three do what the spec. says. I am assuming that IE 10 will fix that. In any case, this just corroborates the issue that I was alluded to earlier, that there is no way for a script to tell whether the -1 value means that the element is non-focussable or whether it is focussable but not tabbable (this situation would occur if the tabindex content-attribute was set to value -1). This is an API design issue - I'm not sure whether this is the right place to bring it up. My apologies if it isn't. Best Regards, Sumeet Singh