CSS user-select

By  on  

In my quest to contribute to every Mozilla project possible, I spent some time last Friday making updates to Firefox DevTools.  The JSON Viewer component needed some love so that was first on my list.  While viewing the CSS for the JSON Viewer component, I saw something I hadn't recognized:  CSS user-select:

.heading {
  -moz-user-select: none; /* don't allow selection */
}

After a bit of research, I found that you can control what content can be is selected using CSS:

  .dont-select {
    user-select: none;
  }

  .control-select {
    user-select: none; /* don't select anything */
    user-select: auto; /* let the browser decide */
    user-select: all; /* select everything */
    user-select: text; /* select only text */
    user-select: contain; /* selection contained within element bounds */
  }

When I think about it, there's certainly an argument to be made that you'd prefer some content be selected and copied and others content not, like advertisements or images.

This falls into the family of CSS pointer-events where CSS is used for something other than display.  My first thought is that selection preference should be done via a HTML attribute, like autocomplete and autocorrect are.  Anyways, give the demo a roll!

Recent Features

  • By
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

  • By
    Welcome to My New Office

    My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    JavaScript Canvas Image Conversion

    At last week's Mozilla WebDev Offsite, we all spent half of the last day hacking on our future Mozilla Marketplace app. One mobile app that recently got a lot of attention was Instagram, which sold to Facebook for the bat shit crazy price of one...

  • By
    MooTools Zebra Table Plugin

    I released my first MooTools class over a year ago. It was a really minimalistic approach to zebra tables and a great first class to write. I took some time to update and improve the class. The XHTML You may have as many tables as...

Discussion

  1. MaxArt

    Been using that for a while – obviously, the most common usage is none.
    It’s odd it’s still not been finalized and it’s been used like this for *several years* already, still with vendor prefixes and all.

  2. user-select: contain; seems like it could come in handy and it would be easier to change the values via CSS than everywhere in the markup. Support isn’t too shabby either…

    http://caniuse.com/#search=user-select

    I enjoyed the demos. Thanks for sharing.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!