What the rain knows

Selectors that People Actually Use opens:

This post has been a long time coming. It’s a combination of my distrust for JavaScript CSS selector performance analysis and my disdain for the CSS 3 Selector specification.

As best I can make out, the back story is that John Resig, developer of the jQuery JavaScript library completely implemented the draft of the CSS 3 Selectors spec. At some later point (seems like 2006), he ran a poll (now lost) asking jQuery users which selectors they were actually employing. He then removed support for the ones that nobody seemed to need.

It’s a long post and worth reading (more so if you use jQuery), but the gist seems to be that he doesn’t see any point in re-implementing the bits of the CSS 3 Selectors spec for which he’d previously snipped out the code because no jQuery community member has asked for any of them.

The CSS 3 Selectors working draft has 3 active editors - in the order that they’re billed on the draft: Daniel Glazman, Tantek Çelik, and Ian Hickson (for Google). Glazman has responded to Resig.

Glazman points out that the working group was also crafting the spec with XML in mind and addresses Resig’s complaints regarding individual selectors (read the post). He also suggests why jQuery users might not have been clamoring, up to now, for any of the missing selectors:

Second, when he says “What’s fascinating is that no one has ever, ever, requested that these features be added back in. They have virtually zero real-world use and applicability”, I think John should think twice before being harsh with the CSS Working Group and the XSL Working Group. Most of these selectors were added to the spec - or taken from the an old XSL draft - after we provided uses cases. Furthermore, most of these selectors are not implemented by IE and not yet by Firefox. Why the hell do you want people to care about them ? There’s not a single book about them because the spec is not a REC yet !

So we have here selectors that are not implemented yet or not interoperably and Web designers don’t use them. How surprising !!!

Will Tantek Çelik or Ian Hickson weigh in?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 6:11 am and is filed under Uncategorized and has been assigned the following tags: CSS 3 Selectors, css selector, Daniel Glazman, Ian Hickson, John Resig, jQuery, Tantek Çelik. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.