[css-ui-4] controlling selection for list decorators?

[reschke]

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-ui-4/#content-selection

It would be good if it was possible to control selection for autogenerated list decorators (such as item numbers in an ordered list). That would make copying lists out of the browser into plain text messages less painful.

[frivoal]

This is related to the question of selectabilty of the ::before and ::after pseudo elements.
One approach would be to say that ::marker { user-select: none; } means they cannot be selected, while ::marker {user-select: text; } means they can.

This still leaves (just as it does for ::before and ::after) some questions open:

• What should be the default? Historical precedent suggests it should be none or something (auto?) that computes to none. Do we solve that via auto computing to none, or via UA stylesheets having ::marker { user-select: none; } But it isn't even clear that the historical default is actually the desired behavior.
• Is this synchronized with copy and paste? Selection related APIs? Accessibility views? Hopefully the answer would be yes, but it isn't clear that the APIs concerned are in sync with eachother, or capable of dealing with stuff that's not in the DOM. Here the answer may be different between ::marker on the one hand and ::before and ::after on the other. Or maybe not.

[frivoal]

(Note: the concerned raised in this issue is reflected in https://drafts.csswg.org/css-ui-4/#issue-9901bc8c in the spec, while the extra questions I raised are in https://drafts.csswg.org/css-ui-4/#issue-1a7baa20)

[frivoal]

The editing TF part of this discussion is there: http://www.w3.org/mid/04c3339e-c1d9-25d3-8f4f-e40659ed4db8@gmx.de

[reschke]

Thanks for tracking this. FWIW, I agree that the current default might actually not what people want.

[frivoal]

@astearns @atanassov I think we cannot close this one without getting some input from other WGs, to figure out how this would work from the point of view of DOM centric APIs relating to selectability etc. Could we use TPAC to try and get some other people in the room and talk through this? I'll tentatively add this to the agenda in the hope we can.