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RFC Citation Link Jumps #440
Description
Describe the issue
When clicking on a link to an RFC in running text (e.g., [RFC9580]), the reader is jumped to the reference entry in the References section and back to the citation in so short a time that the reference entry cannot be read at all. Of course, you can hover and go to the RFC from the popup, but then why link to the references section?
Note that this is different behavior than appears for non-RFC citations (e.g., [FIPS-204]) where the reader is taken to the reference entry and then needs to navigate to the non-RFC doc or back to where they were in the text on their own.
Link to example rfc
Activity
alexisannerossi commentedon Jul 7, 2026
triage: will fix
holloway commentedon Jul 16, 2026
@mferguson-rpc thanks for reporting this. There was a bug on links to RFCs that caused behavior that matches that description, and that's now been fixed. Can you please test to see if the bug is fixed for you? Thanks!
Techy details:
Links to RFCs render using
RFCRouterLink, which wraps the links in a Reka Popover (the Wikipedia-style hover/focus preview card).Non-RFC links are unaffected.
When the Popover closes, Reka's default
onCloseAutoFocuscalls.focus()on the RFC Link to restore focus.These links to RFCs can be internal/hash links eg
href="#RFC1234".If a reader clicked on an internal link to an RFC when the popover was open, or nearly open, the page would scroll down to the link
target, and then Reka would immediately attempt to restore focus so the browser natively scrolls back to the initial link to an RFC, yanking the reader back to roughly where they clicked.
The fix is to adjust the default Reka behaviour for
onCloseAutoFocus, which cancels Reka's focus restoration when focus is already outside the card (e.g. on the just-clicked trigger link) because there is nothing to restore.When focus is inside the card (eg keyboard Escape) the WCAG-friendly focus-return is preserved.
mferguson-rpc commentedon Jul 17, 2026
Thanks for having a look! I can now see the reference entry and stay there to read it. However, same problem with getting back to the citation in text as reported in my response to #441.