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

> On Mar 17, 2016, at 08:58, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 3:21 PM, 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?
> 
> So, it's been a few months since I brought up this topic.  Any further
> thoughts or objections, or should I spec this?  If so, should it go
> into Selectors 4, or push off to Selectors 5?

Go ahead. A cool down period was nice to see if some alternative views
on the topic would show up, but they didn't. The proposal make sense
to me.

 - Florian

Received on Thursday, 17 March 2016 14:49:13 UTC