1359157 - Support Selection.type

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: DOM: Selection, enhancement)

Description

[Aryeh Gregor (:ayg) (no longer with Mozilla)]

http://w3c.github.io/selection-api/#dom-selection-type
https://github.com/w3c/selection-api/issues/14

I don't see what the point of it is, but it seems to be implemented more or less interoperably by Chrome, WebKit, and Edge.  There are no tests right now, I'll write some.

Comment 1

[Aryeh Gregor (:ayg) (no longer with Mozilla)]

Uh-oh, we already have a chrome-only property .type.  What do we do?  Can we rename the chrome-only property to selectionType or something and update all callers?  Or might this be used in extensions, etc.?  Perhaps we can expose the new property only to content and not chrome (confusing!)?

Comment 2

[Aryeh Gregor (:ayg) (no longer with Mozilla)]

By the way, I submitted tests upstream: https://github.com/w3c/web-platform-tests/pull/5683

Chrome passes all tests, and Edge/WebKit have some failures with non-collapsed selections in invisible content, but they're basically interoperable.

Comment 3

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

Yeah, I think we need to rename the chrome-only property. Please check also all the addons. If the property is used by many addons, we'll probably need to support first both the old and new name, but use of the old one would warn. And then afterwards remove the old one and add the new .type.

Comment 4

[Aryeh Gregor (:ayg) (no longer with Mozilla)]

Try run with the .type property removed entirely is green: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/#/jobs?repo=try&revision=92efece1ac90edcfb5faeb55a3d171d9bad1162a

I can't use https://dxr.mozilla.org/addons/source/ to search add-ons, because it just returns an error after a while (I assume timeout).  Anyway, it's hard to search for -- I was trying the regexp /[Ss]elect[a-zA-Z0-9_]*\.type\b/, but it will have lots of false positives and negatives.  In m-c there are no callers except layout/generic/test/frame_selection_underline.xhtml (which didn't show up on try because it's disabled on Linux, oops).

So what do you want to happen here?  Is there a way to make .type behave per spec for content and like the current .type for chrome, with a warning to move to .selectionType or whatever?  (It's not immediately obvious to me how to do this, because the attribute types are different.)

Comment 5

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

I'm not aware of any sane way to make the type of the interface to be different in chrome vs content.
Using any as the type would be horrible hacky way.

https://dxr.mozilla.org/addons/search?q=selection.type&redirect=false returns some results.
Looks like code tends to expect the spec'ed behavior, meaning that maybe that code will actually break after the change? One would need to look at it closer.

Comment 6

[Aryeh Gregor (:ayg) (no longer with Mozilla)]

I understand in Firefox 57 we're dropping support for old-style extensions, so that means if try is green this can be landed in 57, correct?

Comment 7

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

I think so

Comment 8

[Aryeh Gregor (:ayg) (no longer with Mozilla)]

Attachment: Bug 1359157 - Support Selection.type from spec;

All other browsers already support it, more or less interoperably.

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/164516/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/164516/

Comment 9

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

Comment on attachment 8893401 [details]
Bug 1359157 - Support Selection.type from spec;

https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/164516/#review169862

Comment 10

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/faf1b9f57700
Support Selection.type from spec; r=smaug

Comment 11

[Sebastian Hengst [:aryx] (needinfo me if it's about an intermittent or backout)]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/faf1b9f57700

Comment 12

[Chris Mills [:cmills]]

I've made sure the support status of this is up to date on:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Selection
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Selection/type

And added a note to the Fx57 rel notes:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/57#DOM