Betalogue

There is a new highlighting behaviour in Mac OS X 10.5 that occurs whenever you control-click (or right-click) on a link. Look at what happens, for example, when I control-click on a URL in a e-mail message in Mail:

In addition to bringing up the expected contextual menu, Mac OS X actually also chooses to highlight the link that I am clicking on. But instead of highlighting the entire link, it only highlights the “word” on which I have clicked. A word, here, seems to be defined by “anything between two punctuation signs,” including spaces, periods, etc.

I can understand the desire to highlight something in order to indicate to the user what his mouse click and the commands that this click brings up actually apply to. But if that’s the intention, why does it only highlight a portion of the link?

Surely it is quite obvious that the commands in the contextual menu apply to the entire link and not just to the highlighted “word.” This creates a rather bizarre situation where you have a command such as “Copy Link” that applies to the entire link but it actually looks like you are only going to copy the “word” that is highlighted. In other words, what is highlighted and what is selected are two different things. Not good!

For the record, the same thing happens in Mail, Safari, etc., so it’s clearly something that Apple implemented in Mac OS X itself. It also occurs both for links where the text of the link is the same as the actual URL of the link (as in the example above) and for links where the text of the link is not a URL, but a regular phrase. And the punctuation signs that are treated as separators between “words” can also become “words” themselves and be highlighted by themselves, if your mouse click falls exactly between words or on a punctuation sign.

This can lead to truly bizarre situations where control-clicking on a text link actually highlights the space between two words:

I really do not see how this can be anything other than misleading. It’s not like there are commands in the contextual menu that apply to the actual text that is highlighted (a single space?) as opposed to the underlying link (although that could in theory be useful, since sometimes you want to copy the text of a link rather than the value of the underlying URL).

In fact, here is the probable source of this strange new behaviour. When you control-click on a word that is not a link, then things start making more sense:

Mac OS X automatically highlights the whole word and shows menu commands that can be applied to this word, such as “Search in Spotlight,” “Search in Google,” and “Look Up in Dictionary.” And if the control-click falls on the space between two words, then Mac OS X highlights the space and just offers one command, “Copy,” plus some application-specific command such as “New To Do” (in Mail) and “Inspect Element” (in Safari). Presumably searching for a space in Google or in the dictionary is not likely to produce mind-opening results.

(Now here’s an efficient way to enter a space if I ever saw one: control-click on an existing space, copy it, then place your insertion point in the destination and control-click to bring up the “Paste” command. Four mouse clicks and movements just to insert a space. Wow!)

So that’s probably what happened: Apple introduced this new functionality for applying commands such as “Search in Spotlight” and “Search in Google” to regular text, and somehow forgot to check what the behaviour would be when the “text” in question would actually be part of a link. Unfortunately, when the text is part of a link, control-clicking brings up a completely different contextual menu, which no longer contains commands such as such as “Search in Spotlight,” “Search in Google,” and “Look Up in Dictionary.” And so the highlighting behaviour becomes wrong and actually misleading.

If Apple really wanted to give the user some feedback on what is selected by his control-clicking on links, it would have been more appropriate to put some blue halo around the whole link or something like that. But it doesn’t look like they bothered to design a different behaviour when control-clicking on “words” that are part of a link, and I must say that it makes their work look rather amateurish and unpolished.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Friday, November 23rd, 2007 at 10:51 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.