68206 - the Text Field Highlight color is not skinnable

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 509958

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, defect, P4)

Description

[marlon bishop]

Theme development would benefit tremendously by having ability to access this 
color in theme CSS

Comment 1

[Peter Trudelle]

sounds like more of an editor issue, reassigning.

Comment 2

[rubydoo123]

css -- handing over to marc

Comment 3

[Joe Hewitt (gone)]

Looks like there's a proposed pseudoelement in the latest CSS3 spec with just
this purpose in mind.  See:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/WD-css3-selectors-20001005/#UIfragments

Comment 4

[Marc Attinasi]

Well, we could go ahead and implement the ::selection pseudo-element as a
proprietary extension until the CSS3 Selector module is ratified.

'::-moz-selection' would do the trick.

Please see bug 62843 an bug 65133. Bug 65133 is a tracking bug for CSS3
selectors, so I am linking this bug to that one for now. Also, CC'ing glazman
since he is the CSS3 selector draft editor and the most likely candidate to
implement this (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) ;)

ps. I'm curious, where is the current selection color coming from, the OS?

Comment 5

[marlon bishop]

yes it comes from the OS

Comment 6

[Marc Attinasi]

Pusing to Daniel as I try to shed non-critical CSS bugs... This is another CSS3
selector kind of issue. (Daniel, if you object to the reassignment, please let
me know)

Comment 7

[Pierre Saslawsky]

If :selection is too complex to implement for moz0.9, we can add a new property 
-moz-selectionColor

Comment 8

[rubydoo123]

setting to moz1.0

Comment 9

[Aaron Leventhal]

The W3C accessibility guidelines ask that selection be configurable to be shown
by something other than color.

Wouldn't that be a nightmare for us if the height and width of the selected text
changed because of the style rule? What kind of performance hit would we take as
the user quickly resized the selection? I can't think of any software where the
selected text is a different size than if it was unselected. 

Even if you could, wouldn't it be confusing as your whole page layout changed?

What is really needed, I think, is to be able to draw boxes around the
selection, or underline it, without the page layout being affected.

Comment 10

[Daniel Glazman (:glazou) (not active in Mozilla any more)]

Certainly !!! Imagine that you assign 'font-size : 150%' to the selection. You
have "hello world" on your screen and you select "hello" ; the world automagically
doubles its size but you did not change the pointer's position. So you end up
with "hell" selected.

This is the reason why the only applicable property to the new css 3 ::selection
pseudo are color, background and decoration properties, ie properties implying
a repaint but not a reflow.

Comment 11

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Bugs targeted at mozilla1.0 without the mozilla1.0 keyword moved to mozilla1.0.1 
(you can query for this string to delete spam or retrieve the list of bugs I've 
moved)