disable text selection while pressing 'shift'

Question

I\'m implementing item selection functionality in javascript (using jQuery). item is a li that contains some html.
the user can click on one item (makes it select

Answer 1

I have an application like that. Trick is, I wanted to allow selection, but I also wanted Ctrl-click and Shift-click for selecting items.

What I found was that everyone but IE allows you to beat this by canceling the mousedown event, and in IE what works best is to temporarily disable onselectstart:

$("#id").mousedown(function (e) {
    if (e.ctrlKey || e.shiftKey) {
        // For non-IE browsers
        e.preventDefault();

        // For IE
        if ($.browser.msie) {
            this.onselectstart = function () { return false; };
            var me = this;  // capture in a closure
            window.setTimeout(function () { me.onselectstart = null; }, 0);
        }
    }
});