Question

I find it intriguing and couldn’t find any special reason as to why the cursor should not advance to the next form field when the field type is “drop-down selection” or “radio button”. As in both cases logically there cannot be any additional input.

Is there any attribute which can be applied so that the cursor moves on to the next field.

Consider how many forms are filled daily worldwide and how much time being wasted if there is no special reason.

Answer 1

STOP! What you are trying to do will break keyboard users. In fact, any change you make will break somebody’s workflow.

Auto-tab should not be used for any field, ever.

Who knows your field is going to auto tab? Nobody. Why? Because that’s not what fields do on the web. So, I press tab out of habit to get to the next field, what did I do? Oh no, I’ve tabbed past the next field, thanks to an unexpected auto-tab. Now I’ll just have to tab back.

I’m editing a field, there are enough characters in the field already, I want to overwrite some characters in the field, oh no! I’m being auto-tabbed out of it before I can finish!

I’m a keyboard user, I use the up and down arrows to change the value in a select or radio. These are triggering onchange events every time I press them, even though I haven’t finished changing the value to the value I want.

When I want to tab to the next field, I’ll jolly well press it myself thanks.

There is a very special reason not to autotab, and this doesn’t really waste any time (unless you’re developing something for somebody to use constantly for several hours at a time). The special reason is you’re following the principle of least astonishment.