Re: Selectable text inside block level links (was Re: Clickable area for hyperlinks)

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 12:36 PM, André Luís <me@andr3.net> wrote:
> On Jun 14, 2012, at 6:51 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 10:36 AM, Simon Sapin <simon.sapin@kozea.fr> wrote:
>>> Le 14/06/2012 19:04, Tab Atkins Jr. a écrit :
>>>> The "actionable area" is just the element's own geometry, based on its
>>>> display type and the relevant properties.   That's well-defined by the
>>>> layout mode it's in.
>>>
>>> Most box types have a margin/outer area, border area, padding area and
>>> content area (each including the next). Which of these is the actionable
>>> area? Where is this defined? In browsers it seems to be the margin/outer
>>> area.
>>
>> Border area.  That's the area that hit-testing is done on.
>> Hit-testing is not defined in CSS yet, unfortunately.
>
> On a related albeit a bit offtopic-ish note (apologize for the hijack), block-level links have a "defect" of disabling text selection.
>
> Tab (or anyone else, for that matter),
>
> given your experience, where do you think this "problem" is best tackled? The what-wg, here (www-style), bug reports on all user-agent trackers...?
>
> And by block level links I'm referring to <a> with display:block; or <a> with block level elements inside (as permitted by the HTML5 spec).
>
> Now, if you have a paragraph (or a long portion), that text is pretty much unselectable on all user agents apart from mobile, which can cause frustration when using them.

Unfortunately, that's a pretty basic quality of normal links.  They
hijack the clicking behavior, which happens to look a lot like
selection behavior.

This should probably be brought up with individual browsers as a bug
report.  Hopefully they can figure out some way you can click on a
link without following it, so you can select text (like maybe
Shift+click).

Alternately, in some browsers you can activate Caret Navigation mode,
which lets you navigate around the text of the page with a text
cursor.  You should be able to use that to select text inside a link.

~TJ

Received on Friday, 15 June 2012 20:22:15 UTC