Text highlighting problem...

IE only allows huge chunks, not single words and sentences

[KevinM]

Hi guys and gals,

I'm in the process of building my very first web-site <snip> but highlighting any text in IE6 is nigh on impossible. It seems I can only highlight huge chunks and not specific words or sentences, though everything is fine using Phoenix or Mozilla.

Any ideas?

P.S: only the main page and guestbook are up at the mo - It's still a work in progress :)

[edited by: korkus2000 at 7:52 pm (utc) on Mar. 24, 2003]
[edit reason] No specifics please [/edit]

[Birdman]

Welcome to Webmaster World! What do you maen by "highlighting" text? Do you mean bold, italic, or different background?

[KevinM]

By highlighting I mean placing the cursor at the start of a word or sentence, left-clicking and dragging the mouse over it. Whenever I try to do that I select huge chunks, sometimes half the page instead of the single word or sentence.

If someone wants to take a look the link is in my profile.

[Purple Martin]

I can't find the link in your profile, but I'll have a guess at what's happening.

I'll bet that your text is in more than one table cell or div, right? When the bit of text you're trying to highlight crosses from one cell into the next, IE will highlight all the text in both cells. Try selecting text in a table in MS Word, you'll find that it behaves in the same way.

I hope I've guessed right, as I said I can't find your site so I'm flying blind.

[Birdman]

Profile links will not show until you hit a certain amt. of posts.

This is something I've seen with absolutely positioned divs. Are you using Front-Page?

[KevinM]

Birdman: I use Dreamweaver, but I'm trying to force myself to do more hand-coding :)

Also, my whole site is layed out using absolutely positioned <div>'s, so that must be the cause. Now to work out how to fix it...

[digitalghost]

We just added a print ready CSS style. Not a perfect solution but people can cut and paste text if they want to. I haven't run across an elegant solution yet to the highlighting problem.

[Birdman]

You may have overlapping elements and not know it. I put a temporary border on everything to find out what is going on, fix it, the remove the borders.

[Purple Martin]

Hi KevinM, thanks for the stickymail. I looked at your site Firstly, it's very cool, I love the design!

Secondly, I didn't have much luck finding the cause of the problem. I think Birdman is right: when I took "position: absolute;" out of the #content style, the highlighting problem went away (but of course the content div was in the wrong place). I tried various other stuff but nothing else I tried would make the highlighting problem go away.

Good luck!

[KevinM]

Bah...thanks anyway guys. I may have to go with tables instead, though I was told to try not to use them for site layout if at all possible.

Ah well!

[Birdman]

Kevin, that is not a great reason to scrap CSS [w3.org] and go back to tables. What you should consider is scrapping the absolute positioning because I don't think you really need it in your layout. Also, why are you so worried about the highlighting factor? Just wondering :)

[Hester]

I get this problem on some pages too. Trying to highlight text results in the whole screen before or after the cursor being lit up. I found a solution was to triple-click on the paragraph or cell, then you only get the text there. I have my wheel mouse set to double-click when you press down the wheel button, so a quick double click of that has the same effect.

I too use absolutely positioned divs here and there, so that might be the problem for me too. (Though of course it shouldn't matter to the browser at all.)

[SuzyUK]

Here's a page [meyerweb.com] that demo's what's happening (in IE) a click and drag will select all text before the drag (yes it's absolutley positioned divs that it occurs in)

A double click selects a word, and a triple click selects the paragraph, but you can't then right click--> copy you have to ctrl+C(copy)then ctrl+V(paste)

But I echo Birdman, not a reason to go back to tables ;) but rather ask is it really necesary to be able to let others do this because if the really want they can print the page, if you want to do this then instructions are above.

And of course there are people who spend time trying to find ways to reduce the ease with which their content may be being copy/pasted, although we know there's always a way to get it.

Suzy

[KevinM]

Birdman: I thought about it today at work and decided to leave my pages as they are, text highlighting problems or not, because like SuzyUK stated, if someone was that desperate to copy some text off my page, they'd find a way, even if it meant highlighting the whole page and then weeding out the bits they didn't want in a text editor.

As to why I'm so "worried" about it, I guess it's just the perfectionist in me ;)

I only started the thread in case it was something really easy to fix, but as that doesn't seem to be the case (damn you IE6! ) I think I'll just leave it be.

Thanks again everyone. :)

[KevinM]

Just a little update in case anyone is still interested :)

A friend of mine solved my little dilemma by suggesting switching from using negative margins and using auto-width margins to centre my <div>'s instead.

Everything is peachy now :)

Thanks (yet)again everyone.