Re: [css4-pseudo] The need for more powerful pseudo elements

I'd like to throw a use case into this discussion.  The attached HTML demo
is the least-bad way I'm aware of to do a table with angled column
headers.  There are several pain points in here (transform: not affecting
the layout box, tables being Special) but the one that's relevant to this
conversation is: for the style to work correctly, you have to write vacuous
divs,

<td class="shift"><div>content</div></td>
<td class="skew"><div><div>content</div></div></td>

I don't really care *how* CSS enables me to get rid of those vacuous divs,
but I think it definitely *should* be possible to do the styling I want
without them.