- From: Justin Wood <jw6057@bacon.qcc.mass.edu>
- Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2004 01:12:11 -0400
- To: W3C Style List <www-style@w3.org>
Justin Watt wrote: >This might be something of a black hole, but has anyone thought about >using pseudoclasses to apply style based on document content, as opposed >to structure or other intrinsic qualities of structure? > >One example of what I mean is described here: >http://www.unc.edu/~jwatt/2004/07/css-pseudoclass-for-negative-numbers.html > >Let's say you have a table that has negative numbers in it. You want the >negative numbers to appear red while the other numbers inherit their >color. > >The might be "pseudo"-coded in CSS as: > >TD:negative-number {color:red;} > >The problem is that variations in content are infinite. So it probably >wouldn't make sense to create a ":negative-number" pseudoclass because 100 >different people would probably request 100 different selectors for their >special cases. > >Maybe there is a way to take advantage of simple pattern matching based on >content, perhaps using regular expressions? > >The following might read: make the text inside TDs red if that text begins >with a hypen (minus-sign) and ends with one or more other characters. > >TD:content-regex(/-.+/) {color:red;} > >The benefit of this approach being that if negative numbers in your >document are surrounded by parentheses, you can modify the regular >expression in the stylesheet rather than having to modify your document to >play nice with a UA's implementation of ":negative-number". > >Thoughts? > >Justin Watt > > > > > As a note, I like the *thought* of the reg-ex, however think of the CSS forward compat parsing rules, what would happen when a regex contains a ) or a {, } etc. (insert other possible regex chars), even when escaped a UA that does not understand the :content-regex( ... ) as you propose would END parsing at the closing ). so in light of "thought" it is good, but there would have to be a way to specify such characters without actually using them, which would make any worthwhile regex that much harder to write/parse and also make for real annoying author errors on the subject. The rest of your issue which I would have stated has been responded to in the thread already, so I will keep from adding duplicate thought. ~Justin Wood
Received on Saturday, 17 July 2004 01:13:21 UTC