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interactionsRAMS

Positive tabindex Values

NEVER

NEVER: Use positive tabIndex values (>0) as they disrupt natural tab order. Use tabIndex="0" to add to flow, tabIndex="-1" for programmatic focus only.

Avoid positive tabindex values that disrupt natural tab order

Bad

Good

Why it matters

Rams ships this as a Moderate checklist row, not prose. Our reading: natural tab order follows the DOM, and a positive tabindex creates a parallel ordering system on top of it. Use tabindex="0" to join the natural order, or tabindex="-1" for programmatic-only focus.

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.