Re: [css3-ui] scoping 'nav-index' (or tabindex) for large document use cases

FWIW, there's a proposal to extend tabindex with tabindexscope to address
the same problem:
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2011-November/033775.html.
I agree that if we're going to add nav-index, we should also address the
scoping problem.

On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 3:22 PM, L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org> wrote:

> One of the issues that came up in the joint meeting between CSS and
> WAI Protocols & Formats at TPAC (on October 31) was the 'nav-index'
> property in http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-ui/#nav-index .  (This is
> the second of two messages (on different topics) to follow up on that
> discussion.)
>
> There was a brief discussion that both 'nav-index' and tabindex are
> difficult for authors to use on large pages.  This was because of
> the impression that one of the use cases is likely to be doing a
> small amount of reordering of the tabbing order.  In particular, I
> think the following two use cases may have been brought up:
>
>  (1) The author wants to say that the tabbing order (sequential
>  navigation order) should be assigned a certain way for large
>  sections of the page, each of which contain many navigable items.
>  For example, consider two div elements, each with a large number
>  of links in it, where the author wants all of the elements in the
>  second div to appear in the tabbing order before all of the
>  elements in the first div.  This currently requires assigning
>  tabindex, at a minimum, to all the tab-navigable elements in at
>  least one of the divs, if not all the tab-navigable elements in
>  the whole document.  It would be easier if there were a way to do
>  this by applying styles only to the divs (and perhaps their
>  container; see item (2)).
>
>  (2) The author wants to say that the tabbing order (sequential
>  navigation order) should be assigned a certain way for a group of
>  elements within a specific container without having to specify the
>  order for everything else around them.  Right now, saying that two
>  links inside a div should be reached in the order opposite the
>  default one, but should appear in-sequence relative to the content
>  outside of the div, requires not only specifying 'nav-index' or
>  tabindex on the two links, but also on all the other links in the
>  document.
>
> It seems useful to be able to address these use cases by assigning
> properties or attributes to only a few elements rather than having
> to do so globally.
>
> (Note the desire for the tabbing order to be the way it is may be
> the result of positions assigned in the style sheet, which is why
> the tabbing order may belong in the style sheet as well.)
>
> I don't recall concrete proposals for how to address these issues,
> but they seem likely to be worth addressing in css3-ui.
>
> -David
>
> --
> 𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
> 𝄢   Mozilla                           http://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂
>
>