308844 - CSS a:active on keyboard selection via tab not operational

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: CSS Parsing and Computation, defect)

Description

[jonathan chetwynd]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b3) Gecko/20050712 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b3) Gecko/20050712 Firefox/1.0+

when one tabs to a link using the 'tab' key it should be - active - but isn't
pressing the - enter - or - return - key is then equivalent to clicking.

however this isn't the case

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.tab to the link in the test case
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
nothing

Expected Results:  
the link should change colour

Comment 1

[jonathan chetwynd]

Attachment: link should change colour when tabbed to using keyboard

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

IIRC, Internet Explorer for Windows sets :active if you tab to a link (in
addition to setting :focus).  Is that correct according to the spec?  Should
Gecko do the same?

Comment 3

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

The original Netscape implementation of alink, on which :active is based, was
just the color for between mouse down and mouse up.  IIRC, IE made it much more
like what CSS2 calls :focus, which persists after the mouse has been lifted. 
You're basically asking to make :active equal to :focus, which would suggest
that there wasn't a reason to add :focus.

The definition of :active is that:
# The :active pseudo-class applies while an element is being activated by the
# user. For example, between the times the user presses the mouse button and
# releases it. 

Note that it's not *after* the element has been activated, but while it's being
activated.  So I really don't see any good reason to change behavior here. 
Pages that want to style focused links can use :focus.