Focus on load

The ability to run code in your web browser has given us many great things, such as Google Maps. But once in a while a tiny annoyance will make me long for the days when a browser was just a browser, and not a platform. Today's annoyance is the trick to place the keyboard focus in a text box when the page loads. Here is a screen-cast of my unscripted rant and demonstration of the effect (1:43).

The main problem with these script tricks is that there's not a good way to customize them across the board, apart from disabling Javascript entirely.  Each web site has its own user interface, even if it's ostensibly just a document.  The example is Atlassian because I happened to be browsing their stuff today, but I'm not picking on them in particular.  Actually I'm finding Confluence to be fairly impressive, and (dare I admit it) less clunky for non-technical users than the open source options (the best of which might be Twiki).

©20022015 Christopher League