Question

I have a .html file containing text content like:

<div> The study concludes that 1+1 = 2. (Author in Journal..., Page ...) Another study finds...</div>

Now when viewing this in Firefox, I want to be able to conveniently copy the text in the () brackets. But 2 left mouseclicks only mark one word like “Journal”, and 3 clicks mark the content of the whole div.
So my idea was to put the brackets in another div like:

<div> The study concludes that 1+1 = 2. <div>(Author in Journal..., Page ...)</div> Another study finds...</div>

But this leads to the () text being pushed into a new line, but the text flow shouldn’t be altered at all, I just want to achieve the copy+paste behavior. Is there a way to achieve this? I thought about applying a div class to the () and canceling the attributes in the .css file, but somehow it did not work.

Answer 1

Essentially a triple click will mark a paragraph. So even if you were able to make your inner div inline (which is very simple, you can use style="display:inline"), the browsers text analyzing engine would still read it as one paragraph (or one block) and use the standard behaviour: mark the paragraph.

So basically: no, not if you use only CSS. You have to use JavaScript to identify a triple click on the element and mark it.