I wonder if we couldn't let .focus() behavior be the one used by the system and require authors to use .setSelectionRange() if they need to cursor to be at a specific position?

What's "the one used by the system" supposed to be?  Normally you'd focus things by clicking on them, which would place the cursor where you click.  So you mean what you'd get by alt-tabbing to it?  Do platforms actually differ on where the cursor goes then?  (Linux seems to select the contents.)

(In reply to comment #2)
> So
> you mean what you'd get by alt-tabbing to it?  Do platforms actually differ on
> where the cursor goes then?  (Linux seems to select the contents.)

For example, yes. But the idea is it doesn't seem to be very useful to specify that given that an API is available to set the cursor wherever the author wants.

I don't get what you're saying.  Surely it's always good to specify things exactly so that browsers are interoperable, even if there are clearer ways of doing the same thing?

What I meant is it's better to request the UA to behave like the system usually behave to keep some consistency. If we do that, authors would not be able to [sanely] rely on a particular behavior but given that we have the selection API, it doesn't seem to be a big deal.

Is platform consistency relevant to focus()?  Would users expect behavior of focus() to match the platform behavior of tabbing to the field?  That seems unlikely to me, unless it's being used specifically to emulate tabbing for some reason.

Given that systems might have different behavior for that and the web platform has an API to override this behavior, it doesn't sound really important to force all UAs to have the same behavior on all platforms.
FWIW, a lot of things in focus management seems to be "do whatever the platform do".

Anyway, that's no big deal.

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Status: Partially Accepted
Change Description: see diff given below
Rationale: It's platform-specific, but I've explicitly called out where it has to happen if it happens.

(It has to be platform-specific, because users will complain if, e.g., tabbing to a field doesn't do the same thing as in other apps on their platform.)

Checked in as WHATWG revision r5911.
Check-in comment: Define when the platform-specific focusing behavior happens relative to focus events, etc.
http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=5910&to=5911

mass-move component to LC1