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CSS selector wish list

Snookerman — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 11:18:02 GMT

With CSS3, we have gotten many new pseudo selectors that give us a great deal of options. However, the short list of combinator selectors has only been increased from 3 to 4:
Code:
foo bar
foo>bar
foo+bar
foo~bar
The first combinator is the most used selector and selects any element bar that is a descendant of foo. The second combinator selects any element bar that is a child (direct descendant) of foo. The third combinator selects any element bar that is an adjacent sibling to (comes directly after) foo. The fourth one, that was defined in CSS3, selects any element bar that is a general sibling (comes after but not necessarily directly after) foo.

The problem here is that there is no way to select foo. One case that I often come across is when foo is a parent to bar. To select bar, we use foo>bar so it makes a lot of sense to select foo using bar. In the adjacent sibling case we use a plus sign to go forward: foo+bar so it would make sense to use a minus sign to go backward: bar-foo. This is fine for elements but can be problematic for class and id values where the minus sign can be mistaken for a hyphen. The same goes for XML elements that (I think) can contain hyphens. The solution could be to only allow combinators separated by spaces: bar - foo (now, the spaces are optional (except for the first case of course)). The opposite symbols to use for the other two cases are less obvious, but we could for instance use bar^foo for the first case and *looks at keyboard to find a symbol* maybe bar=foo for the last case (although an equal sign doesn't make that much sense here (then again, neither does an exclamation point when it means not in some languages (except for !important in CSS which I always think of as not important although it means the exact opposite (am I alone?)))). So my wish list would look something like this: Code: foo bar bar ^ foo foo > bar bar < foo foo + bar bar - foo foo ~ bar bar = foo The selectors in red are my suggestions and don't work now, so don't use them! So please W3C, can I has selectors? Eddy Proca



Happy belated/early Naked Day!
Snookerman — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 08:10:14 GMT
Yesterday, April 9th was the fourth annual CSS Naked Day. Participating websites get rid of their stylesheets and feed their naked markup to the world. The reason for this is to promote web standards and semantics.



To learn more about this and sign up (for next year) go to this page: http://naked.dustindiaz.com/



P.S. I know it would have been better if I posted this before April 9th but I forgot :rolleyes: about it. Well, instead of seeing this as a late post about CSS Naked Day 2009, you can think of it as a really early announcement for CSS Naked Day 2010 :D




Earth Hour 2009 8:30-9:30pm
Snookerman — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 07:32:07 GMT
Saturday 28 March 2009 at 8:30PM local time, wherever you live on planet earth.




Today, Saturday March 28 at 8:30PM your local time you can do something for our planet by switching off your lights for just one hour. You can go to the Earth Hour website and register to let everyone know that you will VOTE EARTH today. The goal is 1 billion people and the results will be presented at the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. The policies decided there will replace the Kyoto Protocol.



You can also take a look at the Earth Hour YouTube channel to see what people will be doing during Earth Hour.



So remember to switch off your lights today, Saturday, March 28, 8:30-9:30pm.