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

For your information, an issue had just been opened in W3C's CSSWG
repository for editor's drafts on GitHub. The url is
https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/588

Your participation is welcomed.

2016-10-07 10:49 GMT+08:00 Ian Yang <ian.html@gmail.com>:

> 2016-10-07 4:21 GMT+08:00 Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>:
>
>> 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_add
>> ing_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
>>
>
> Speaking of importance and use cases, I can assure you that there is no
> dedicated web developers in the world who value the maintainability and
> semantics of HTML while doubt the importance and use cases of ::wrap pseudo
> element.
>
> Take this lists.w3.org page
> <https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2016Sep/> for example,
> the metadata area under the heading should have been markuped with <dl>.
> But because there has been no way to wrap <dt> and <dd> pairs with CSS, the
> developer had to use the less semantic <ul> and <dfn>.
>
> Yet another example is that, "left and right columns" layout design is
> everywhere so we have been having to add two wrapper <div>s into HTML for
> that kind of purpose.
>
> The aforementioned examples are just a tip of iceberg. The use cases of
> ::wrap are apparently more than the use cases of :first-child and so on.
>
> Since getting more people involved seems to be a necessary step in
> proposing a feature like this one, I will go through the step. Is there a
> CSS equivalent of whatwg/html on GitHub
> <https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues> in which I can open a new issue?
>