As promised, Igalia has begun work on :focus-visible in WebKit, the project chosen by many in our Open Prioritization experiment, as funds became available. Manuel Rego began work in January.

Open Prioritization aims to not only provide insight into prioritization challenges, and give access to more direct ways to affect those priorities, but also to offer a view into what the concrete work that goes into implementations once prioritized actually looks like.

As you might know, initial prototypes were developed in Chromium, behind experimental features and a polyfill was developed, as well as Web Platform Tests. It is, in many ways (but not all) similar to a much earlier proprietary experiment in Firefox called :moz-focusring . For a couple of years, of feedback was gathered, details adjusted and led a proposal was made, and the CSS Working Group adopted it in the specification. :focus-visible first in Chromium proper on October 5, 2020, soon followed by Firefox on January 25, 2021 (while our experiment was running). Our experiment brings prioritization to this in WebKit as well.

While many might imagine that all that is left is to write some code for WebKit, implementations are much more than that. Each implementer brings a new set of critical eyes and questions as they attempt to understand and implement, and the result is often further refinements across the board.

In the process so far, in addition to his prototyping and actually landing 5 patches to WebKit, Rego has also opened 3 new CSS Working Group issues, merged 13 PRs into Web Platform Tests, landed 4 patches in Chromium and more. This is why, while it is very difficult to align priorities while they are independent, helping ensure that they align early where there are opportunities to do so can be very beneficial.

If you are curious for more insight into the work, progress, process in January so far, as well as the plans for work in February, Manuel Rego has provided a full and public report blog post.

As of this writing, are currently at a little over 80% of our funding goal. We are very happy with our results so far, and if you also believe this is a postive things, please consider helping keep the work funded.