[Implementation] Can we push browser vendors to implement :has()?

CSS
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For those that don’t know, here is the spec for :has(), per the CSSWG:

The relational pseudo-class, :has(), is a functional pseudo-class taking a relative selector list as an argument. It represents an element if any of the relative selectors, when absolutized and evaluated with the element as the :scope elements, would match at least one element.

To my knowledge, this is not being actively worked on by any vendor. No doubt, this single selector complicates CSS by a mile implementation-wise. However, the implementation of such a selector would be widespread, as most experienced developers could attest.

Hopefully you all agree that this is a very powerful selector, and should be implemented.

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Unfortunately, the :has() selector is almost useless since it’s supposed to be available in JS only, not in CSS. That’s probably one of reasons why it has not much implementors’ interest — web developers just don’t need it in its current state.

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I was under the interpretation that it was going to be in CSS as well as a level 4 module. If that’s not the case, then disregard this post.

Having it in JS would still be useful, but not as useful as CSS.

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See the spec section about dynamic and static profiles. The dynamic (CSS) profile explicitly excludes :has() unlike the static (JS) profile.

In JS we are already able to implement similar functionality since JS is fortunately a programming language. To be fair, having :has() in JS would indeed allow to make our JS code somewhat less verbose by avoiding extra querySelector() calls for the purpose of testing whether an element contains something matching a selector that we could use as an argument for :has().

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Interesting, I’d never heard of that. So basically it’ll be implemented in JS and not vanilla CSS? This would still be something worth pursuing from vendors, in my opinion.

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Agreed, the thought of having something like :has() available in CSS was a blissful thought, but even if it’s only going to be implemented in JS, it still is useful in many cases and worth the fight.

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