Re: Disabling non-collapsed selection

Right, we would definitely don't want to provide yet another way to annoy
users. I'm fine with (in fact I've been always inclined towards) not
providing APIs for this.

- Ryosuke

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 8:08 AM, Aryeh Gregor <ayg@aryeh.name> wrote:

> (sorry for the delay in responding, I was on vacation for about ten days)
>
> On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 1:51 PM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa@webkit.org> wrote:
> > Is there an interest in providing a way to prevent non-collapsed
> selection
> > under some node in a document? And if there is, what are use cases?
> > Authors periodically file a WebKit bug against our implementation of
> > selectstart event that they can't use it to disable selection. WebKit
> > supports "-webkit-user-select: none" to do this but some authors
> apparently
> > want to allow collapsed selection.
> > I personally don't quite understand why authors ever want to do this but
> I'm
> > not totally against the idea of providing new mechanism for this if there
> > are good use cases.
>
> As far as I know, the use-case is to prevent users from copying text
> easily.  For instance, on this page:
>
> http://www.snopes.com/science/dhmo.asp
>
> Sites that have paid content only available to subscribers don't want
> subscribers to copy text to other places.  Also, sites that are
> ad-supported might want users to come visit the original page (with
> the ads) instead of reading the text elsewhere.  Or authors might just
> want credit for their work.
>
> There's no way we can stop authors from making things inconvenient for
> users -- they could always call getSelection().collapseToStart() every
> 50 ms or something.  There's also no way we can stop users from
> copying if they're determined -- they could save the HTML and copy
> from there, say.  I don't think we need to add features to the spec to
> make it easier for authors to stop users from copying, because a lot
> of authors will misuse them.  I also don't personally think browsers
> need to add features to make it easier for users to evade anti-copying
> measures, because a lot of users will misuse them.  The browser can't
> decide what copying is good or bad, and shouldn't assume that the
> author or the user is right.
>
> So I wouldn't worry about this much either way.  I certainly don't
> think a declarative feature to prevent all non-collapsed selections
> (or all copying) is a good idea.  A lot of authors are overprotective
> of their content and would stop totally legitimate copying if given
> the chance.
>