Avoid trapping focus in Table

[evansjohnson]

Fixes #3834

Checklist

• Includes tests
• Update documentation
  • testable in existing table docs

Changes proposed in this pull request:

Immediately preventing default on tab key presses seems problematic since sometimes we return early and do nothing on the tab key press. This happens when the selection is already at the edge of the table and will not move further. This PR proposes that in these cases we should allow focus to freely leave the table.

I considered other solutions including:

• Making this a new optional option.
  • In the next major version, this option could be defaulted to true, and possibly removed in the future if we see no valid cases where trapping focus is desired.
• Introducing a new pattern to move focus into the table, such as Enter when the table is focused to switch to current behavior, and otherwise have the table be a single element in the tab order.
  • Esc would "exit" this interaction mode
  • Big downside of not being very discoverable
• Are there other best practices for table interaction to consider?

Reviewers should focus on:

• Is this the interaction pattern we want?
• Should this be applied as a fix, or a new option?

Screenshot

n/a

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Type

• Feature
• Improvement
• Fix
• Break
• Deprecation
• Manual task
• Migration

Description

Avoid trapping focus in Table

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[svc-palantir-github]

Avoid trapping focus in Table

Build artifact links for this commit: documentation | landing | table | demo

This is an automated comment from the deploy-preview CircleCI job.

[gluxon]

Thanks for this fix!

I'm personally leaning towards not optionalizing this and treating it as a fix. I can't imagine any users that would want the Blueprint table to trap focus within it. 🤔

[gluxon]

Approving based on my thoughts above. I think this is the right fix. Let me gut check this with another person to make sure this sounds reasonable.

[pgoldberg]

I agree that this should just be treated as a fix – I imagine no one wants the behavior of tables trapping focus