Today I Learned

hashrocket A Hashrocket project

`user-select:none` needs prefixes for each browser

The user-select css property governs if text is selectable for a given element. user-select: none means that it is not selectable.

What's interesting about this property is that while each browser supports it, they each require their own prefix, except Chrome, which does not need a prefix.

In create react app, what starts out as:

user-select: none;

Gets expanded to:

-webkit-user-select: none;
-moz-user-select: none;
-ms-user-select: none;
user-select: none;

But the default browserList configuration for development in your package.json file is:

"development": [
    "last 1 chrome version",
    "last 1 firefox version",
    "last 1 safari version"
]

And so in development, it gets expanded to:

-webkit-user-select: none;
-moz-user-select: none;
user-select: none;

Sorry Micrsoft.

How does create react app know which prefixes to render? The caniuse-lite npm package has up-to-date support data for each property and user-select:none is defined here.

That data is compressed. Here's how to uncompress it using the node cli to see what it represents:

const compressedData = require('caniuse-lite/data/features/user-select-none');
const caniuse = require('caniuse-lite');
const unpackFunction = caniuse.feature;
unpackFunction(compressedData);

This is accomplished in create react app by the npm package autoprefixer;

See More #html-css TILs