Re: [selectors] Suggestion for :focus-ring pseudoclass

> On 23 Sep 2015, at 07:21, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm currently in discussion with Alice Boxhall and Brian Kardell about
> their input modalities proposal (which we discussed at the f2f), but
> one thing that came out of the discussion which seemed independently
> relevant is the ability to directly style the "focus ring" state.
> 
> By "focus ring" state, I mean the subset of :focus that, in the
> absence of any overriding author styles, triggers a UA focus ring.
> This currently happens any time a text input or [tabindex > 0] element
> is focused, and when a button is *keyboard* focused (but not when it's
> clicked).
> 
> Mozilla has something approximately equivalent today, with
> :-moz-focusring
> <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/%3A-moz-focusring>.
> (The only difference is that it doesn't match anything if "focus ring
> drawing" is turned off.)
> 
> The main benefit of such a thing is that, today, if the default UA
> focus ring style does not work well with your site's theme, you're
> kinda screwed.  You can manually write a :focus rule, but you can't
> predict when an element would have a focus ring drawn; you'll
> unfortunately start drawing focus rings when the user mouse-clicks a
> button.  Using :focus-ring instead does the right thing automatically,
> triggering your styles only when the UA determines via heuristics that
> it should draw a focus ring.
> 
> (Those heuristics might not always be right, and that's part of my
> continuing conversation with Alice and Brian, but that's separable
> from this topic.)
> 
> Thoughts?


This seems to make sense. It builds off the same internal model that the input modality pseudo used, and exposes it in a syntax that is more to the point when trying to address the primary (only?) use case: the focus ring.

The bit that confuses me a little is that you say "independently relevant". Do we still need the modality pseudo if we have this?

 - Florian

Received on Thursday, 24 September 2015 14:00:29 UTC