Re: [css3-selectors]: Proposal: Adop the ::wrap pseudo element

On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 1:45 AM, Ian Yang <ian.html@gmail.com> wrote:
> Any advice, please? Personally, I hope this pseudo element could be adopted
> as early as possible. It's not like developers can use it right away once it
> is adopted because it takes time for major browsers to implement it.
>
> This pseudo element can do a lot more than just wrapping <dt> and <dd>
> pairs. For years, we have been adding extra <div>s or <span>s into our HTML
> codes just because we have to achieve a certain layout or positioning. With
> ::wrap pseudo element, we can say good bye to that inflexible approach and
> styling or redesigning web pages would become impressively flexible and
> time-saving. I really don't see any reason not to welcome it and see it
> joins the CSS family.

As fantasai and I stated earlier in the thread:

> Yeah, this is the big thing.  New pseudos that wrap "real" elements in
> some way are... not popular among implementors. The idea for ::wrap
> goes back well over a decade, and the complexity it adds to the
> platform versus the benefit you get, when compared to just adding
> wrapper elements in your HTML, has meant that implementors have never
> bitten at the idea.

To be clear, we only add features to the spec that have use cases and
interest in being implemented in at least two major browser engines.
(Those are the most important steps of the process as described by
WHATWG <https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#Is_there_a_process_for_adding_new_features_to_a_specification.3F>,
which we generally follow as well.) So there is nothing really simple
about this; adding features to the web platform is generally a
multi-year effort that involves convincing a lot of people that what
you want is (a) important; (b) cannot be accomplished any other way;
(c) will be used by lots of people (on the same order as existing
features of the web); (d) is something browser engine engineers want
to spend their resources on.

It's definitely not impossible!  But neither is it just a matter of
having a good idea and then sitting back.  This idea, in particular,
has been suggested for over a decade, and implementors have never been
interested in it (as it ends up adding significant complexity, both to
the CSS language itself, and to implementations), so you're facing an
extreme uphill battle here.

~TJ

Received on Thursday, 6 October 2016 20:22:00 UTC