[whatwg] Text selection in IFrames

[Sander Tekelenburg]

At 09:37 -0500 UTC, on 2007-08-09, Devi Web Development wrote:

[...]

> On 8/1/07, Ian Hickson <<mailto:ian at hixie.ch>ian at hixie.ch > wrote:
>>It depends on the platform's conventions. It's not really an
>>interoperability issue as far as I can tell.
>
> Not an interoperability issue? One of the main benefits of HTML has been
>it's device-independence. Ideally, a page should look and act the same in
>every browser on every platform.

Not at all. Ideally a page should look and behave such as is most useful to
the user. It might confuse *me* to see multiple selections in a document, but
if that's the convention someone else is used to, why confuse him by breaking
that? Or why should I confuse you by forcing my convention upon you, when
that might conflict with what you're used to? Not to mention all those looks
and behaviours that are common in one browsing environment, but simply
impossible in another.

> Frankly, I don't see an application for
>using user-selected text, but if a script requests the selected text, it
>should be clear what the script is getting.

I would assume that an environment that shows all selections in all iframes
is something the user is used to; he'll be fully aware which frame is the
active one; and the UA will probably hand the active frame's selection to a
script, when the script asks for 'the' selection. (I'm not a javascripter;
this just seems logical to assume.)


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg
The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>