How Can I Make HTML Elements Unhighlightable?
How Can I Make HTML Elements Unhighlightable?
Ask by Revati S Misra
Updated 09 Jan 2025
In order to prevent HTML elements from being highlighted, there are combinations of CSS properties or attributes that prevent an element from being selected. This is done by affecting browser interactions related to text selection within particular elements.
The first one is to mask the text from being selected by applying some web CSS properties that prevent the mouse pointer from selecting the text. Some user interface frameworks or libraries already offer ready-made tools to accomplish this feature. It can be used for particular items such as links and buttons or on the whole layout of the given webpage as needed.
With these techniques, you can make sure that whatever is placed on your webpage cannot be highlighted – this may come in handy when you are developing interfaces with some sort of interactivity or when you have some data that should not be highlighted, for some reason. However, it should be pointed out that the TextSelection class itself disables text selection only partially, and thus cannot be regarded as a way to protect content.