307693 - Selection moves to different element

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: Selection, defect)

Description

[Caleb]

Reproduction steps:

1. Open the URL:
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&searchlink=FOUR|FRESHMEN&uid=MIW060505271437&sql=11:7x6fmpb39f5o~T2

2. Put the mouse cursor after "The Four Freshmen" and start a selection from
right-to-left.

3. Keep moving your mouse to the left while the left mouse button is pressed,
and you will notice that once the mouse is under "wrong person? more matches
HERE" the selection moves to that element.

I'm not sure if this is a site specific CSS/HTML issue or some kind of a bug.

If you click and hold (to show the focus rect) on "wrong person? more matches
HERE" you will notice that it shows a box that overlaps the artist name...

In IE6:
 * You can easily select the artist name
 * Clicking on the arist name, when the mouse pointer is above the "wrong
person" link does not do anything.

In Opera8:
 * You can easily select the artist name
 * Clicking on the arist name, when the mouse pointer is above the "wrong
person" link actually visits the "wrong person" link.

In Firefox:
 * You can not easily select the arist name.
 * Clicking on the arist name, when the mouse pointer is above the "wrong
person" link does not do anything.

Comment 1

[Marian POPESCU]

I confirm with : Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b4)
Gecko/20050909 Firefox/1.4 ID:2005090900

Comment 2

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

Attachment: testcase

This is more or less the situation. Although with this testcase, IE6 also has
the bug.
This issue is not a recent regression, I can see it also in Mozilla1.7

Comment 3

[Eli Friedman]

This behavior is basically by design; the frame associated with the area above
the link is the link, and where the selection should go is determined by that. 
IE's behavior is wrong because the padding should not be ignored; Opera
apparently uses different methods for determining the location of clicks and
selection.  It would be possible to act more like Opera, but I don't really
think that's worthwhile to pursue.

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Eli, feel free to wontfix as needed!