Investigate viability of using <a tabindex=0> instead of <a href="#">, etc.

[ajpiano]

As I understand it, the main thing holding us back from increased use of the tabindex attribute for allowing focusability to arbitrary elements, and avoiding using href="#", is the fact that elements that are not natively tabbable without tabindex are not tabbable on Safari 3, which runs only on [relatively] older phones. If switching to tabindex can help, for instance, with suppressing the browser status bar when hovering over a dialog close button, and other problems, we should investigate whether the usage levels of Safari 3 at present truly merit keeping tabindex "tabled."

[Jörn Zaefferer]

So we don't support Safari 3 anymore. I don't know which other components this affects, but Scott dropped the accordion anchors already. Would probably be more useful to have component-specific tickets.

[Jörn Zaefferer]

Scott, any reason to keep this open? As far as I can tell there isn't.

[Scott González]

The ticket description gives the reason this is open. Why do you think it shouldn't be open?

[mikesherov]

Replying to joern.zaefferer:

So we don't support Safari 3 anymore. I don't know which other components this affects, but Scott dropped the accordion anchors already. Would probably be more useful to have component-specific tickets.

I think this is why. Either way, it shouldn't be "new", so I'm marking it as open.

[tj.vantoll]

I tested this out and tabindex="0" works fine in our supported browsers (IE 8+, Firefox, Chrome, Safari 5.1+, Opera, and Windows 8 touch devices). For the most part though, I think we should avoid <a> elements without href attributes anyways - since they're semantically meaningless they really should be <span>s or <div>s.

I switched the slider over for #9890, and dialog's close button now uses a button widget, so is there anyplace this issue is still relevant? Datepicker comes to mind, but we'll be addressing that in the rewrite. Spinner uses <a> elements, but they use tabindex="-1" and no href.

[Scott González]

A quick search seems to confirm that those are all the uses. I also never wanted to continue using anchors when we made this change.

Closing as fixed since this was just a meta ticket.