About that.

A browser is a 'User agent', as in it is supposed to act on MY behalf, and things in my intent and benefit. Similar agents are real estate agents, or attorneys as my agent.

So... For something that is MY agent, why are browsers creating, and instituting anti-agent choices against my will?

Barring excuses of "following the spec", I should be able to easily disable my user-agent's execution of said onerous code.

(I'm ignoring this for Google chrome. They're an adtech company, and they won in court as a monopoly. Fuck them.)

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nofriend 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Sometimes not being able to select is useful. You can trivially create a user style that overrides user-select: none if you'd like, something that isn't possible in most gui software.

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charcircuit 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>A browser is a 'User agent', as in it is supposed to act on MY behalf

It's supposed to implement the spec. Why are you and many other people on this site so attached over the wording of "user agent"? It is supposed to mean the software making the request, it doesn't mean anything more than that.

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ameliaquining 2 days ago | parent [-]

The argument is that the W3C shouldn't have included this feature in the spec, because it (allegedly) prioritizes the interests of publishers who want copy protection over those of end users who want to copy stuff. If true, this would violate the "priority of constituencies" HTML design principle: https://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-co...

As it happens, the relevant standard actually includes a response to this argument (https://www.w3.org/TR/css-ui-4/#valdef-user-select-none):

"As user-select is a UI convenience mechanism, not a copy protection mechanism, the UA may provide an alternative way for the user to explicitly select the text even when user-select is none.

Note: none is not a copy protection mechanism, and using it as such is ineffective: User Agents are allowed to provide ways to bypass it, it will have no effect on legacy User Agents that do not support it, and the user can disable it through the user style sheet or equivalent mechanisms on UAs that do anyway. Instead, none is meant to make it easier for the user to select the content they want, by letting the author disable selection on UI elements that are not useful to select. Tools such as CSS validators, linters or in-browser developer tools are encouraged to use heuristics to detect and warn against incorrect or abusive usage that would hamper usability or violate common user expectations."

	▲	charcircuit 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		>If true, this would violate the "priority of constituencies" Not neccessarily. For example, piracy is so harmful that it could still outway the cost to a user even with a multiplier given to the user's cost. For example the user's cost is 10 and the author's cost is 100. Even with a 5x priority for the user, the needs of the author outweigh it.