Should popover and dialog share the same "previously focused element"?

[cathiechen]

According to [1], IIUC, each element has one "previously focused element", popover and dialog both work on it.
If dialog is with popover, then we might lose the focus before dialog.show().

<dialog popover>This is a modal dialog</dialog>
<script>
  dialog.show();
  popover.showPopover();
  popover. hidePopover();
  dialog.close();
</script>

Should we indicate that they do not share "previously focused element"? @josepharhar @nt1m @emilio

[1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/interactive-elements.html#previously-focused-element

[josepharhar]

I'm not sure if <dialog popover> was an intended use case when we decided to combine the previously focused elements.
I'm not opposed to splitting them up again if anyone feels strongly about it. Chromium's implementation actually still uses separate previously focused elements.

[domenic]

If we fix #8904 I think this might also get solved? And that issue seems kind of high priority to me.

[cathiechen]

If we fix #8904 I think this might also get solved? And that issue seems kind of high priority to me.

Not quite the same, if there is autofocus inside dialog.

<dialog popover> <button autofocus>This is a modal dialog</button></dialog>
<script>
  // focus on node outside dialog 
  popover.showPopover(); // set the node to previously focused element
  dialog.show(); // set button to previously focused element
  dialog.close(); // clear previously focused element
  popover. hidePopover();
</script>

And yes, I agree this is a corner case, not a high priority:)

[josepharhar]

Dialog elements can be open as popovers, but they can't be open via show()/showModal() and showPopover() at the same time. The example code provided, whether show() or showPopover() is called first, will throw an exception instead of following through.

I don't think that this can be an issue, so I'm going to close this