Bill
Thanks for your help. The TABINDEX attribute can be applied to several form-related entities, such as <SELECT>, <INPUT>, <A>, <BUTTON> and <TEXTAREA>.
It is a means of arranging the keyboard tab sequence of your form fields, starting from "1". Unfortunately, after the JSP page has been rendered, you must still hit the tab key to gain focus on the "1" field. In fact, it seems you need to press the tab key twice, as the first tab stop appears to default to the address bar of the browser.
Still, it was better than nothing at all, or having to fill the page up with excessive JavaScript
Maulin, I don't think Bill was referring to JavaScript at all. TABINDEX is purely a HTML attribute that can be used with certain other HTML tags.
It doesn't gain immediate focus on the error field as I hoped it might, but it has introduced me to a neat way of ordering my tabstops. Especially if your JSP page contains recurring lists of data, you can define an integer to control your TABINDEX values, and use it in a JSP expression as you loop through your lists.