One of my co-workers suggested that
I remove the form reset button
Great idea! The destruction button, misnamed as "reset button", is one
of the most harmful ingredients of HTML forms, see e.g.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000416.html
from the taborder so that it does not
accidentally get invoked.
Oh... then I suppose you have analyzed that your form is one of the rare
cases where the destruction button can actually be useful. Typically,
this would be a data entry form used by a person repeatedly, in manual
input of a set of entries, so that it is actually useful to destroy the
data irrevocably (as it has already been submitted, and you need to
start from a clean form).
Even then, it is almost always better to make the server-side form
handler return a new page to the client.
But assuming that a destruction button is present, consider adding a
confirmation dialog: an onclick event handler that asks for confirmation
("Do you really want to erase all input?"). It should not have "yes" as
the default answer, since people hit Enter all too routinely without
even reading the text. So you probably need something different from the
common confirm().
From a Web search, I see that I can do this with
taborder=-1
but this is contrary to the HTML 4.01 standard which specifies that
the taborder value must be in the range of 0 to 32767.
I want my pages to be as stand-compliant as possible.
Using a negative number for tabindex complies with the "Living HTML
Standard":
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/editing.html#attr-tabindex
More importantly, it works. If you need to stick to the HTML 4.01
recommendation of the W3C, then I'm afraid you are out of luck. But I
would not take HTML 4.01 too seriously; the W3C doesn't - they have
effectively abandoned it. It's still relevant (it reasonably well
reflects what browsers do, though some parts are unimplemented, and
there is a lot more that browsers do), but it is not being maintained,
and the W3C works in close cooperation with the WHATWG though not in
complete harmony.
If Company Police/Policy or some other authority requires HTML 4.01
conformance, you might cheat a bit and set the "forbidden" tabindex
value in JavaScript. But tabindex = -1 won't get caught by markup
validators anyway (they don't check the value).