A case can be made for graphic like elements like buttons, but for text: treat it like text even if it's clickable.
In the Web version of Outlook, there are regularly times where the location of an appointment is a street address. That text is typically clickable. But the click action doesn't correspond to the choice of mapping service I might want to use in any one instance or to the fact that I might have other actions, like copying the address into another email/sms/etc. Outlook followed your philosophy. You can't select and copy that text, save for going through several auxiliary clicks just to get to a spot where you can. It's the most annoying behavior I can imagine.
That you think that you sitting in a meeting room talking it over with colleagues, or perhaps I'm a meeting in your own mind can assign legitimate uses and not, when something other than say security might be at stake, is just wrongheaded.
And by the way, that address being the link that it is is great 60%, 70% of the time. But when it's not it's clearly a design mistake.
The point isn't that the developer should disable text selection whenever he thinks it's unnecessary, which would indeed be silly. It's that sometimes the user interface rules for navigating selectable text conflict or interfere with the user interface rules for navigating, say, a set of tab panes. In that situation, making the tab titles selectable will cause grief.
I agree with your address example. That is user data, and it should be selectable.
I don't think we disagree, too much. tab panes matches the "button" example.
However, I am sympathetic to those arguing translation. Sometimes I'll visit Japanese or Chinese websites. With some frequency, even if most of the site has an English edition, I'll find some UI element not translated, including buttons and the like... OK I think it was the commenter that I responded to, in a different reply said... just Google it if it's a single word. Great! But I don't even know where to begin to get the right characters from my old fashioned US keyboard. So now I have to Google for how to use my keyboard to get the characters I want, which also may need pre-requisite knowledge of the language I'm trying to translate (radicals and all that jazz)... that's a heavier lift than may be anticipated and where a simple copy/paste into an appropriate translator would make things much, much easier.
I would suggest this: make everything buttons, links, tabs, etc. selectable and copyable unless there is a real explicit and compelling reason to do otherwise. Now to be fair, I'm old enough to have been "online" in some fashion or another since before general public internet access availability was a thing... so my expectations for butter-like user experiences are low and my desire to do any damn thing I want high... but even today, there are probably still more websites which don't stop you from copying anything than there are searching for that polished experience where only the right things can be selected. The discontinuity and the deviation from the expectation that I can copy anything I also find as something which diminishes the user experience, even if occasionally I'm annoyed by over selecting things.
In the Web version of Outlook, there are regularly times where the location of an appointment is a street address. That text is typically clickable. But the click action doesn't correspond to the choice of mapping service I might want to use in any one instance or to the fact that I might have other actions, like copying the address into another email/sms/etc. Outlook followed your philosophy. You can't select and copy that text, save for going through several auxiliary clicks just to get to a spot where you can. It's the most annoying behavior I can imagine.
That you think that you sitting in a meeting room talking it over with colleagues, or perhaps I'm a meeting in your own mind can assign legitimate uses and not, when something other than say security might be at stake, is just wrongheaded.
And by the way, that address being the link that it is is great 60%, 70% of the time. But when it's not it's clearly a design mistake.