One button in all common dialogs needs to have focus by default. I thought it should be OK unless a Cancel button is present (in which case it'd be Cancel), but consensus in #mozilla (and Windows standard) seems to be that the OK button has focus. However, I think the standard is actually to give focus to the button that triggers the least harmful action. Since this isn't always necessarily cancel, we'll need a way to let the caller choose. I'm attaching a patch that, for now, provides the default focus defaults (under the assumption that no focus was explicitly specified somewhere by the caller).

cc'ing alec for sr

r=timeless w/ a minor warning about Cancel as default. Request someone provide reference Human User Interface guidelines from Apple [macos], Microsoft [windows], Sun [java] and Be [BeOS/BeBible].

The button that has the dark border (initially? bug 63728) should also start with focus, I think. No new code for default defaults should be necessary. I just made this bug block bug 52751, "Hitting return dismisses dialog when default button disabled". Btw, the phrase "common dialogs" usually means Windows save/print dialogs (which are common across applications), but I'm assuming that you're talking about dialogs with just text and buttons.

That black border needs to follow focus, not the other way around. I'm going to file a separate bug for that later.

List, List, List, List, List. We agree they're lists :-) r=timeless on 21294

Alec, can you sr?

any chance I can get a diff -bw? there's alot of indentation fixes there, not sure where the real fix is.

thanks, this is pretty neat. sr=alecf

Netscape nav triage team: as per Alec Flett's pre-triage recommendation, this bug is nsbeta1-.

Thanks, fix checked in.

tested this w/an alert dialog containing a textfield. eg, using an htaccess dialog or the mailnews login dialog [used the former this time --the OK button is in focus, and outlined in black]. vrfy fixed on linux, winnt and mac: 2001.02.09.08 comm bits.