Re: [Selection] Support of Multiple Selection (was: Should selection.getRangeAt return a clone or a reference?)

On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 9:35 AM, Aryeh Gregor <ayg@aryeh.name> wrote:
> It's not just that it was only implemented by one UA.  It's also that
> even in Firefox, multiple-range selections practically never occur.
> The only way for a user to create them to to either Ctrl-select
> multiple things, which practically nobody knows you can do; or select
> a table column, which is also extremely uncommon; or maybe some other
> obscure ways.  In evidence of this fact, Gecko code doesn't handle
> them properly either.  Ehsan might be able to provide more details on
> this if you're interested.

Though I believe browsers will soon have much more pressure to support
multiple ranges as a matter of course, as increased design with
Flexbox and Grid will mean that highlighting from one point to
another, in the world of "a range is defined by two DOM endpoints and
contains everything between them in DOM order", can mean highlighting
random additional parts of the page that are completely unexpected.
Switching to a model of "visual" highlighting for selections will
require multi-range support.

In other words, it'll switch from being a rare thing to much more common.

~TJ

Received on Saturday, 24 January 2015 19:19:17 UTC