Clicking <option> should not fire click event on the element’s container

[alyssais]

In Chrome or Firefox, clicking on an option element results in a click event, where the event target is the option element.

In #770, clicking an element in webdriver was specified to fire an event at the option's parent node (the select). This is inconsistent with browsers, and means that there is a difference between webdriver implementations and browsers. This decreases the utility of webdriver implementations for testing, because code that works fine across browsers doesn't work correctly with webdrivers.

Is this intentional, or should the specified behaviour be changed to match what browsers do, and fire the event at the option element itself?

[andreastt]

The initial mouseOver, mouseMove, and mouseDown events should probably only be fired at the container element (<select>) of <option>, but you’re right that click event should be fired on the target <option> element. The change event should still happen on the container.

In reality, what happens when the user clicks a <select> to select an <option> is that the dropdown first receives a click to open it, then the item is clicked, and because it belongs to the <select>, they both receive click events through bubbling. It is different with <select multiple> beacuse there’s no dropdown.

I don’t think we should simulate the opening of the dropdown because it is specific to the UA how they choose to visually represent <select>, but we should change WebDriver to issue the click on the target <option>. The change event should still happen on the parent.

[alyssais]

So, what's the process for changing this? Should I open a PR?

[andreastt]

Normally we require commitment from vendors to make backwards incompatible changes, but I think if we choose to preserve the click event on <select> (which it is right to do, due to event bubbling) and add a new click event to <option>, it could qualify as a bug fix.

All changes to the spec do require corresponding test changes in WPT. Relevant tests are:

• https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/blob/master/webdriver/tests/element_click/select.py
• https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/blob/master/webdriver/tests/element_click/bubbling.py

It’s a bit annoying that the first test doesn’t have any architecture for recording DOM events.

[andreastt]

Since clicking <option> is “special” I don’t actually think any changes to bubbling.py is required, since all the events involved here are entirely synthetic (i.e. don’t go through the browser’s event queue but are faked).