:focus-visible in WebKit - April 2021

A new report after a new month is gone, you can see the previous ones at:

Again this is a status report about the work Igalia is doing on the implementation of :focus-visible in WebKit, which is part of the Open Prioriziatation campaign. Thanks everyone supporting this!

There has been some nice progress in April, though some things are still under ongoing discussion.

Script focus and :focus-visible

Finally we decided to reflect the reality in the script focus tests that I created, and merge them on WPT. The ones where the implementations Chromium and Firefox don’t match the agreed expectations (the ones when you click a non-focusable element, and that click moves focus elsewhere), where marked as .tentative.

So we opened a separated issue to explain the situation and gather more feedback about what to do here.

Once we had the tests I implemented the same behavior as other browsers, the current one reflected on the tests, in WebKit. The patch got reviewed and merged, so script focus and :focus-visible work the same in all browsers right now.

:focus-visible and Shadow DOM

The test that checks that :focus-visible doesn’t match on ShadowRoot was also merged in WPT. That’s the current behavior on WebKit implementation too. More about this in January’s post.

Implementation details

There was a crash in WebKit due to my initial implementation of script focus, that problem has been already fixed. Also an extra bug was found and fixed too.

On the review of those patches, some new discussion started about different things related to :focus-visible feature, like why a keyboard input triggers :focus-visible matching. The discussion with Apple engineers is ongoing on the bug and let’s see how it ends.

Some numbers

Let’s take a look to the numbers again:

• 26 PRs merged in WPT (5 in April).
• 27 patches landed in WebKit (10 in April).
• 9 patches landed in Chromium (2 in April).
• 2 PRs merged in CSS spcs.
• 1 PR merged in HTML spec.

Next steps

Implementation is mostly over, now the goal is to close the discussions with the different parties and check the possibilities of shipping this in WebKit.

Thanks everyone that has provided input in the different discussions and jumped on the patches review. Your feedback has been really useful to keep moving this forward.

Stay tuned!