As designed Inconsistenct tab behaviour on different editor states

[RobinHood]

Affected version

2.1.2

On quick reply in a thread, tabbing brings you to the submit button (Post reply), that's how I usually submit my post.

When editing a post, the tab brings your to the attach files button first, which is consistent with the full fat new post editor.

But that is inconsistent with the quick post editor at the top of a thread list, which skips the attach button and allows you to post with a single tab.


It make sense in the full fat editor to go to attach, as there's a lot of fields between the editor and the post thread button, but I think it would be best if it always tabbed straight to the submit button elsewhere (Post thread in the quick editor, quick reply in a thread, and the post edit box.

 

[Chris D]

We'll have to look into this in more detail because there may be reasons for how it is right now which actually make sense.

Though I want to point out that we wouldn't necessarily be aiming to design the tab behaviour based on getting to the submit button quicker. So if there are inconsistencies or better UI/UX practices then it may be that there could be more cases where we don't jump to the submit button first.

As I say, we'll look into it in more detail and review what our overall aims were there.

That said, I'd actually encourage you to use Ctrl + Enter or Cmd + Enter for quick submission of forms. That is specifically designed for that purpose and should work on all forms and overlays regardless of how many fields there are and what tabindex they are

 

[Mike]

Realistically, tab order in XF is entirely essentially defined by the source order (which is how it works by default). Trying to do anything to override that (via the tabindex attribute) is usually seen as interferring with accessibility. In QR, it tabs to the post button first mostly because that actually comes first in the HTML (though that was a roughly intentional decision at design time).

So overall, we aren't going to make any changes here. If you want a guaranteed submission from a textarea, we have the cmd/ctrl+enter system for that (to parallel enter on single-line text fields).