Re: Styling of search/find-in-page results

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 11:20 PM, Mitar <mmitar@gmail.com> wrote:
> Currently it is not really possible to style search/find-in-page
> results. Some browsers reuse selection style (Firefox), some browsers
> have special style you cannot style with CSS (Chrome). I think a
> pseudo-element selector should be provided to change background-color
> and color properties.
>
> Additionally, some browsers support highlighting all search results
> (for example, in Chrome, when user selects to "highlight all"
> matches). This might be another pseudo element?
>
> The use case for this is in Mozilla pdf.js HTML5 PDF library and
> viewer. It uses HTML5 canvas to render PDF5 content. But for the user
> to be able to search and select text content of the PDF, a transparent
> text layer is created above. If you search on the page, you get
> results, but because text layer is transparent, instead of the result
> only an empty colorful box is shown. See here:
>
> http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/web/viewer.html
>
> (Use browser search and not interface which overrides ctrl-f keyboard
> shortcut, this is the topic of another my post to whatwg mailing list:
> http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2014-February/042100.html)

Unfortunately, the definition of such a thing would be essentially
identical to ::selection, which we haven't yet actually specified
either.  (We tried to in the past, but everyone implemented something
observably different, and we haven't taken the time to figure out what
the best solution is yet.)

I think this use-case is valuable, but we need to do more than just
define a variant of ::selection, because ::selection isn't defined
yet. :/

~TJ

Received on Thursday, 3 April 2014 16:20:42 UTC