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Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

You know devs can already make text not selectable on the web, right?

It takes work to make it non-selectable. In Flutter, it defaults to non-selectable.

Most of the time a dev isn't thinking "I'd better make this selectable," because they simply aren't going to think of all the reasons someone might select text. They'll think of the obvious-to-them cases, and leave all the other text as unselectable.

It doesn't really default to anything. There's a widget for selectable text and a widget for non-selectable text.

OK, but the Flutter gallery has zero selectable text, as far as I can see. Seems like a great case of where developer decided "doesn't need selection, let's let the user drag to scroll with their mouse instead".

Why even make it a 50/50 choice? I hate apps without selectable text and they're everywhere. Translating something becomes a nightmare and that hurts useability.

It's like if you made spoiler 50/50. Do you want to see this without clicking?

I think we really overlook the thought that had gone into making js, and other open tech.

Exactly. And I didn't even realize how often I subconsciously select text while I read until I saw the relevant xkcd. [1]

I truly think my random clicking on paragraphs that I'm approaching isn't just ADHD but a way of helping my eyes stay on track. It's very disconcerting when the text doesn't select. (As, clearly, all these comments noticed as well -- why were we all trying to select the text? To check if it's Flash-ish, of course, but also we just like things to grab onto while we read.)

1. https://xkcd.com/1271/

I would even add this XKCD. https://xkcd.com/1174/

Or even translating...

Try putting their demo website in Google Translate or even try to select the text on an email in their demo webmail app to copy paste it in google translate ....

Flutter should pick sensible defaults, in this case most agree that text should be selectable

I'm not happy about "user-select" not having an easy override. But at least it can be overridden by a user CSS file or a browser extension, which isn't so bad. This is much worse.

Flutter: defaults to unselectable

Web: defaults to selectable

Flutter on Web: defaults to Flutter, not Web

Was not aware of that, thanks for letting me know. In either case, it's a dick move and shouldn't be encouraged.

Yes but on the web you can use a user-agent that doesn't care about what the site says should be selectable, or at least an extension that overrides the CSS in question.

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