Question: I have a draggable (jQuery UI) element with "canceled" text on it. Here's what I mean:

```
$('#main').draggable({
        cancel: '#main>* *',
        start: function(){
          // deselect text
        }
});

```

When I drag the element, I often select the text by accident. I want to deselect the text when the element is dragged.

Answer: 
jQuery UI now includes `.disableSelection()`, which you can use to prevent the text inside your elements from being selected. The API documentation on it isn't hugely useful, but: <http://api.jqueryui.com/disableSelection/>

As an aside, Eric G's answer proved supremely helpful for me when creating my own "text highlighting" tool - as Lawrence remarked, it won't throw out an error if no text has been selected.
Clear document selection `document.selection.empty();`

Something like:

```
 $('#main').draggable({
     cancel: '#main>* *',
     start: function(){
      // deselect text
      document.selection.empty();
     }
 });

```