Discussed in the very long https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/4607, but I will summarize here. rniwa@ indicated that filing an issue would be appreciated. If you visit https://boom-bath.glitch.me/tabindex.html in Safari: - You can tab to each <area> element in the last row, and it will become the document.activeElement. - You can click your mouse on each <area> element in the last row, and it will become the document.activeElement. - If you click the "click me" button in the last row, which will attempt to call .focus() on the first of the <area> elements, document.activeElement stays as the <body>. This is a strange exception. Besides <area>, all elements that are click/sequentially focusable, are also programmatically focusable. We're contemplating (in the above-linked HTML issue tracker) making it a spec requirement, or at least recommendation. So we thought maybe Safari would like to change <area> to behave like other elements in this regard.
<rdar://problem/51614064>
In the counterpart Chromium bug https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=972764 we discovered that the test case was invalid. I was attempting to focus a href=""-less <area> programmatically, whereas I was clicking on a <area> that had a href="". Sorry for the noise!