528854 - Selection problems with css-repositioned spans, displayed in reverse order of code

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: Selection, defect, P5)

Description

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

STR

1 open a bmo bug description
2 comment titlebar looks like this:
[reply] [-]   Simon Paquet [:sipaq]      2009-11-15 14:08:54 PST      Comment 1
3 try to select the caption of "Comment 1" link
a) with mouse from left to right
b) with mouse from right to left
c) with keyboard, cursoring from date to the right (F7 caret browsing on)
d) with keyboard, cursoring from first comment line back to the left

Actual

none of a)-d) will select the caption of "comment 1" link

Expected

all of a)-d) should select the caption of "comment 1" link

Note that in the source, comment 1 span comes before the date. So probably it's repositioned with css classes. Nethertheless, Selection should work wysiwyg, as otherwise it's totally unpredictable - user can't know about the code tweaks.

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

STR Update:

Step 2: comment titlebar looks like this:

Simon Paquet [:sipaq]      2009-11-15 14:08:54 PST      Comment 1   [reply] [-]

Otherwise, this issue is still present on bmo viewed with Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

This bug needs QA if it's a firefox rendering problem or just an unfortunate use of css positioning which causes the unexpected/irregular selection behaviour.

Comment 2

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

Attachment: testcase

This is happening because the "Comment 1" link is right floating.

See also this testcase. Start selecting from left to right. Notice the difference of selection between the 2 blocks as the second block has the floater later in the dom.

I guess you could argue that selection should work as a normal user would expect, which is: text selection should go from left to right.
It seems like every major browser is doing the same thing, though.

In any case, bugzilla could also fix this issue, by rearranging the dom, or using different css or something like that. But a new bug should be filed for that, one in the bugzilla component.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

The problem is that selection is a contiguous range in the DOM, which, as you discovered, might have little to nothing to do with the layout....

Comment 4

[Jens Stutte [:jstutte]]

Bulk-downgrade of unassigned, untouched DOM/Storage bug's priority.

If you have reason to believe, this is wrong, please write a comment and ni :jstutte.