1393633 - Text selection cannot start on (or just after) the number of an ordered list

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 12460

(Core :: DOM: Selection, defect, P3)

Description

[Vincent Lefevre]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20170809204109

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open a HTML file containing: <ol><li><a href="http://localhost/">This is a link</a>.</li></ol>
2. Try to select the beginning of the text of the link, starting just before the link.


Actual results:

Nothing happens (nothing is selected).


Expected results:

The text should be selected.

Note: If one starts before the "1.", this works, but doing this is counterintuitive.

Comment 1

[Vincent Lefevre]

Attachment: Test case

Comment 3

[Vincent Lefevre]

Note, since this is not clear in bug 12460 (which is mainly about selecting generated content): I'm not trying to select generated content here, just normal text that follows generated content, and this does not work because I start the selection over generated content.

The problem with the test case I've provided is that one has generated content immediately followed by a link. So, if I try to start the selection just before the boundary, I cannot select anything since this starts over GC (this is this bug). And if I try to start the selection just after the boundary, this doesn't work because this is a link and Firefox wants to do drag & drop.

Comment 4

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Bug 490805 might be related more closely, but that in turn is a duplicate of bug 12460, too, so there we are.

Comment 5

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

As for the problem specifically in relation to links - you can select text within links by holding Alt while selecting.

Comment 6

[Vincent Lefevre]

I know about Alt, but from an accessibility point of view, Alt requires 2 hands (in addition to needing to have a look at the keyboard and/or wasting time to find the Alt key), while normal selection requires only one hand and can be done more quickly. That's why I usually try to start the selection before the link. And this is where this bug occurs.