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interactionsRAMS

Missing Focus Outline

MUST

MUST: Interactive elements must have visible focus indicator. Never use outline-hidden without providing focus-visible replacement. Keyboard users must see where focus is.

Interactive elements must have visible focus indicators

Bad

Good

Why it matters

Rams ships this as a Serious checklist row, not prose. Our reading: focus indicators show keyboard users where they are on the page. Removing the outline is only acceptable if you replace it with something equally visible — use :focus-visible so the ring appears for keyboard navigation but not on mouse clicks.

References

Built by Gleb Stroganov, design engineer at Evil Martians.

The rules come from other people's skills and guidelines — Vercel, Rauno Freiberg, @Ibelick, impeccable, Emil Kowalski, Tailwind, RAMS — each one credited on the Sources page. The work here is extraction and wiring: every rule is pulled into one corpus, given a good and a bad example you can operate, a MUST/SHOULD/NEVER rule an agent can paste, and a link back to where it came from.