The patch highlights the currently active input element
using CSS (:focus).

For input elements of type "submit" or "button" it
tries to suppress the background change, but AFAIK, and
at the time of this writing, only Opera (v9.01) does
this right; SeaMonkey 1.0.4 (Gecko/20060729) can by no
means be convinced to use the inherited background (it
/would/ use any other value, including transparent, but
this doesn't look right either). The usage of
<button...> tags would avoid this problem.

No browser known to me changes the background of <input
type=file...> tags. MSIE 6.0 does nothing at all.

However, for the users of Opera, any flavour of Mozilla
etc. (and likely) the feature /is/ useful, especially
when the focus has been set programmatically (e.g.
because of missing fields, like it is done by the
checkRequiredFields function of sf.net issue 1539081).

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Alternatively, it would be possible to change the input
background for input[type="text"] and input[type="password"]
only. In this case we should take care that every input
field gets its type attribute, since Opera wouldn't do the
:focus highlighting otherwise.

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Submitted a Mozilla bug report:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=348776

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patched style.css checked in; for input tags, the background
change requires the type attribute to be set (text,
password, checkbox or radio).

The input methods set a type=text attribute when no type is
specified.

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input field for file upload in the item template is not
highlighted with mozilla firefox 1.5.0.7.

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Yes, that's a problem; "file" type input fields can't be
addressed directly via CSS. The background might get
highlighted if the rule would address all input tags
(regardless of the type), but this would address buttons,
too; resetting this for button types leads to new problems.

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Yes, that's a problem; "file" type input fields can't be
addressed directly via CSS. The background might get
highlighted if the rule would address all input tags
(regardless of the type), but this would address buttons,
too; resetting this for button types leads to new problems.

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it makes the interface inconsistent: similarily looking
fields behave differently.  in my humble opinion, that
nullifies the positive effect of highlighting the focused
field and makes user interface worse than it was without
highlighting.

higlighting is good, but this emplementation just does not work.

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The lack of highlighting in the file input doesn't bother 
me. I'm happy to leave the implementation as-is for now.