Initially open dialog with closedby can be broken

[lukewarlow]

What is the issue with the HTML Standard?

Given the following markup:

<dialog open closedby="any">
  Dialog
</dialog>

The expected behaviour of a developer will probably be that the dialog is opened and supports close requests and light dismiss to close the open dialog. However, this is not the case.

The dialog won't be added to the document's open dialogs list nor will the dialog's close watcher be established. So the closedby attribute will have effectively no effect.

This also has the effect that calling requestClose() on a dialog in this state, would fail the assetion on step 2 that it's close watcher is not null.

Assertions are comments but this does mean step 6 is a null reference exception.

[lukewarlow]

Potentially closedby not working for initially open dialogs is fine? Correct me if I'm wrong but dialog focusing steps don't seem to run in this circumstance either.

But even if that's the case we need to update requestClose() to gracefully allow this scenario. We have 3 options there, either early return, throw, or call close directly?

[domenic]

I think it would be best if we made this work, including establishing a close watcher. If you have two of them in a row, they would get grouped so that a single Esc key closes them all.