306641 - CTRL-click table selection conflicts with multiple selection and vice versa

Status: REOPENED

(Core :: DOM: Selection, defect)

Description

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

Table cell selection also uses CTRL-click. See also bug 73373, comment 41.
This is not necessarily conflicting, but it's strange that sometimes you select
table cells and sometimes the text.

Which is definetely an issue: after selecting a table cell and then CTRL-click
to select some text, the table cell selection is deleted.

Comment 1

[Julien "_FrnchFrgg_" RIVAUD]

If multiple selection is correctly handled, and triple-click selecting a whole
cell in a table (when the cell is the nearest "block" ancestror), then the
current behaviour of CTRL-click in tables would be directly obtained via
CTRL-(clickclickclick), while allowing more efficient selections (as selecting
the title of the table, for instance.

I think that CTRL-click specific behaviour in tables is thus not needed anymore.

Comment 2

[Julien "_FrnchFrgg_" RIVAUD]

For my proposal to work, CTRL-(multiclick) shoud add to the selection instead of replacing it. It is not the case currently.

Comment 3

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

Attachment: disable table selection for normal documents

This patch disables table selection for normal documents. Documents in designMode and so, still use the table selection with this.
Not sure whether this is the way to go. Anyone have any ideas?
Personally, I'm not a big fan of the table selection thing at all.

Comment 4

[Kathleen :Brade]

Did you test Composer in a Seamonkey / Suite build?

Comment 5

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

No, sorry, I only have a Firefox debug build.
But see this comment:
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/layout/generic/nsFrame.cpp#1583
"DISPLAY_ALL means we're in an editor."

I was kind of asking whether this would be an acceptable change of behavior at all (disabling table selection for non-editor).
Not sure who can decide such a thing.

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

So what problem are we trying to solve?  The fact that you can't ctrl-click text in a table to select it?

From what I understand ctrl-selection of table stuff is fairly useful for things like "print selection", not to mention copy and paste from HTML tables into spreadsheets.  So I'm not so happy killing it off.

Comment 7

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

(In reply to comment #6)
> So what problem are we trying to solve?  The fact that you can't ctrl-click
> text in a table to select it?
Yes, because the table-selection then comes into play.

> From what I understand ctrl-selection of table stuff is fairly useful for
> things like "print selection", not to mention copy and paste from HTML tables
> into spreadsheets.  So I'm not so happy killing it off.
Ok, then my patch is a no-go.

Comment 8

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

So then the only way I see that one of the two need a different combinations to get activated. Multiple selection with the ctrl key is pretty standard on windows.
So maybe table selection needs a different key to get activated? (/me ducks)

Comment 9

[Daniel Luz]

I know no good solution for the problem, but here's my proposal:

- If the user drags the mouse without the ctrl key, clear any selections and start text selection (i.e. no change)
- If the user ctrl-drags over text, keep any selections (including cell selection) and perform text selection
- If the user ctrl-drags over a table with no selection or just with cell selections, perform cell selection
- If the user ctrl-drags over a table with any text selection (even if its mixed with cells), perform text selection

So, if you want to select cells, just start your first selection by ctrl-clicking the cells. If you want to unambiguously select text, even when it's on a table, just start your first selection without holding ctrl.

UNDEFINED: what happens if the user selects a cell in a table and then selects a cell in another table? At the moment, all the cells must be in the same table. If this can't be extended, I say treat the second table as text, i.e. keep the first cell range and start the new selection in text mode.

The downside is that once you have any text selection you can't add cells. But I hope this is a very small price to pay for having both functionalities working most of the time.

Comment 11

[Biju]

+1 for "Possible solution #2" at bug 664762 comment #0