847917 - The documentation for the user-select/-moz-user-select property is very misleading

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Developer Documentation Graveyard :: CSS, defect)

Description

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

The documentation for the user-select/-moz-user-select property is very misleading. Currently the page:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/-moz-user-select

redirects to:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/user-select

which implies that the -moz prefix has been dropped. In fact, as far as I can tell, it's the other way around; the user-select property was proposed in an early draft of css3-ui, implemented by us (bug 25161), then rejected from the specification, after which we must have added the -moz prefix.

We need the redirect to be fixed to redirect the 'user-select' page to '-moz-user-select'.

Other issues with the page are that all instances of "user-select" need to be replaced with "-moz-user-select".

Comment 1

[Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli]]

The redirects doesn't implies this. We do it each time several prefixed versions (here -ms-, -webkit- and -moz) does exists. -webkit-user-select also redirects here.

But most of the time, these redirects happens on experimental css properties, that is properties on the standard track, but not yet at the CR level: in that case the article starts with a green banner explaining the prefix requirement.

The non-standard banner doesn't have such explanation, so I added a banner note beneath it with the information about prefixes.

I also edited the syntax box to carry (-prefix-) in front of the examples.

This should solve this bug.

(As a side-note we really should push these 4-5 non-standard properties on the standard track)

Comment 2

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

(In reply to Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli] from comment #1)
> The redirects doesn't implies this.

I disagree. I think it does. The top of the page still says:

  user-select

  Redirected from -moz-user-select

which is very easy to misread as "-moz-user-select is the old thing, user-select is the new thing".

Now that you've explained that there are redirects for other vendors prefixes, I can sort of see where you're coming from. The problem is that many general users of the site will have no idea about that rational.

Furthermore, the use of:

  (-prefix-)user-select

looks like "the prefix is optional" to me.

I'd request two further changes:

Instead of "(-prefix-)", use "-<prefix>-". The use of angle brackets is common to indicate "this is required, not optional", making it much less likely someone will think they don't need to use a prefix for gecko.

Instead of redirecting to:

  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/user-select

redirect to:

  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/-<prefix>-user-select

That way, again, the URL doesn't imply that the prefix is optional.

Comment 3

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

Or rather, with proper escaping:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/-%3Cprefix%3E-user-select