145297 - input control tabindex="-1" ignored

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 56809

(Core :: DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling, defect)

Description

[Douglas McLaughlin]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0rc2)
Gecko/20020510
BuildID:    2002051006

The field labled Total Hours has tabindex="-1" set in the input control. 
However, the field is still in the tab order.  The HTML docs state that negative
values for tabindex leave the form control out of the tabbing order.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load a page with a form that uses tabindex="-1" in a control
2. Tab through the form's controls.


Actual Results:  The control with tabindex="-1" always received focus.

Expected Results:  The control with tabindex="-1" should have been skipped.

<input type="text" name="TotalHours" value="4" readonly size="8" tabindex="-1">

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> The HTML docs state that negative values for tabindex leave the form control out
> of the tabbing order.

Which docs state this?
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#adef-tabindex merely says that
tabindex must be "must be a number between 0 and 32767".  Thus negative values
are simply illegal and behavior for them is undefined...

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Mail from Douglas:

Ok, I realize this is not the W3, but I am reading the "HTML Programmer's 
Reference", Osborne/McGraw-Hill, by Thomas A. Powell and Dan 
Whitworh.  FWIW, and you probably hate getting this kind of stuff, but it 
works in IE6.  If this is just an IE thing, the book does not say so, and 
the authors have taken great pains to ensure that each browser and each 
browser's version's behavior is documented.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

some quick testing shows:

1)  NS4 does not support tabindex at all
2)  Opera 5 does not support tabindex at all

So the only browser supporting tabindex at the time that book was written was
IE, unless it was written late enough that NS6 was out.  Thus this business of
skipping tabindex="-1" does indeed seem to be an IE-only thing.

The prose at the url I cited _could_ be twisted to the IE interpretation, since
it never mentions elements with negative tabindex in the list of things tabbing
navigates.  But since negative tabindex is also invalid, I would expect a
negative tabindex to have the same effect as no tabindex at all.

Comment 4

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

Per HTML, behaviour is undefined for invalid documents, so for all the spec 
cares we could be making negative tab index numbers reboot the machine and that 
would still be valid...

Ahem.

Comment 5

[rods (gone)]

This is an event state anager issue.

Comment 6

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 56809 ***

Comment 7

[Trix Supremo]

verifying dupe