Update sticky activation docs for new spec changes to carry across pages

[domenic]

Proposal

In whatwg/html#11454, we are updating sticky activation to carry across same-origin navigations and traversals. The docs at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Sticky_activation should be updated to reflect this.

Browser support

This is being prepared to ship in Chromium, almost certainly version 142.

WebKit and Gecko are positive but I don't know about concrete engineering milestones.

Tasks

• Update https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Sticky_activation
• Maybe update https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/User_activation#sticky_activation
• Maybe update https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/UserActivation

Dependencies

No response

Additional information

whatwg/html#11454 contains (or will soon contain) links to browser implementation bugs and web platform tests.

Are you willing to support this work?

Sorry, I am retiring soon and won't have time to provide reviews! @mustaqahmed might be able to help though

[hamishwillee]

My understanding of this is that if you have a page with sticky activation (the user has interacted with it in the current session) then if you navigate to another page on the same origin, or traverse the history forward or backwards, the new page will be assumed to already have sticky activation.

Further if you navigate to a same origin page via that then redirects to a cross origin page and then back to the same-origin page you retain the sticky activation (I think whatwg/html#11454 (comment))

• Right?
• Feels a bit like "sticky activation on any page in a particular origin grants it to all others in that origin".

Presumably this is true however the page is stored - i.e. in a bfcache or whatever?

The linked issues say "This feature preserves the sticky user activation state after a page navigates to another same-origin page. The lack of user activation in the post-navigation page prevents some use cases like showing virtual keyboards on auto-focus, and this has been a blocker for the developers who want to build MPAs over SPAs.".

I take that to mean that without sticky activation propagating anything that requires it will disappear when you navigate to another page in an SPA. This would be irritating if you've navigated to a page where you have auto focus but you have to provide user activation again to get the virtual keyboard back.

Sorry, I am retiring soon and won't have time to provide reviews! @mustaqahmed might be able to help though

You will be missed. I hope you have a cunning plan to enjoy it.