Preventing Automatic Hyperlinking in ContentEditable HTML

Today, a question from the mail bag…

Q: Is there a way to stop IE from “auto-magically” recognizing and creating hyperlinks inside HTML?

First, a bit of context. Web developers can use the ContentEditable property to allow users to edit part of a HTML page. This mechanism is often used to allow users to edit “rich text” when composing a blog post, comment, or HTML email. Similarly, Client Application developers can use the same property when hosting the Web Browser Control (WebOC), again for similar purposes.

However, you’ll notice that if you type text that looks like a hyperlink (e.g. https://example or a@example) into the editable HTML region, the web browser will automatically convert that text into an active hyperlink. In many cases, this automatic conversion is desirable, but in some cases it may not be.

Client Application developers can call IOleCommandTarget::Exec, passing IDM_AUTOURLDETECT_MODE and a boolean value specifying whether or not automatic detection should occur. Unfortunately, this command ID is not mapped to a command identifier string which can be used when calling document.ExecCommand().

This means that, unfortunately, current versions of IE do not offer a way to disable automatic hyperlink recognition from script in the page. There’s no great workaround for this. Some web developers have pointed out that script may execCommand(Unlink) to remove all hyperlinks from the current selection, but this may not be desirable for all scenarios.

-Eric