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
    CSS Gradients

    With CSS border-radius, I showed you how CSS can bridge the gap between design and development by adding rounded corners to elements.  CSS gradients are another step in that direction.  Now that CSS gradients are supported in Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome...

  • By
    39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Image Data URIs with PHP

    If you troll page markup like me, you've no doubt seen the use of data URI's within image src attributes. Instead of providing a traditional address to the image, the image file data is base64-encoded and stuffed within the src attribute. Doing so saves...

  • By
    Use Custom Missing Image Graphics Using Dojo

    A few months back I posted an article about how you can use your own "missing image" graphics when an image fails to load using MooTools and jQuery. Here's how to do the same using Dojo. The HTML We'll delegate the image to display by class...

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!