Author control and possible race condition in dialog.close

[AutoSponge]

The following was a comment from #5678 as part of my action item from APA https://www.w3.org/WAI/APA/track/actions/2290:

The intent to manage focus of a closing dialog is a good one. However, if
authors have a clear understanding of the process they should have the
ability to change the focus target on dialog.close().

A common example: a dialog created for the "confirm delete" action with
"confirm" and "cancel" buttons. Cancel can target the default element per
this spec (i.e., the "delete" button). Confirm would send focus to
body since the deleted item no longer exists. An author should have the
ability to override this behavior but programmatically setting focus could
introduce a race condition with the default behavior.

Possible solutions:

• the addition of a dialog property, with an idref value, that will
  override this behavior by targeting the specified element when present
  provided the element exists and is connected to the dom.
• an options object or flag passed to dialog.close() that overrides the
  default behavior.

[domenic]

Why would there be a race condition? Just call focus after calling close (or after the close event fires). There's no race; things execute in order.

[AutoSponge]

if

dialog.close();
document.getElementById('#myId').focus();

works across implementations, then I don't have an issue with a "possible race condition". That was in response to discussions about async events.

[sefeng211]

The focusing the previously focused element step in dialog.close() is synchronous, and it should work across all implementations. So I don't think there's a race condition here?

Changing the default behaivour, ie not doing the steps is a different topic though.