Re: [selectors-4] :blank pseudo-class

On 8/19/2015 5:17 PM, fantasai wrote:
> http://www.useragentman.com/blog/2012/11/05/css3-pseudo-classes-and-html5-forms-their-limitations-and-a-possible-solution/
>
> The current :blank pseudo-class should probably be renamed
> and :blank used to indicate blank (omitted) form fields.

I think :empty-or-white-space would be an intuitive substitute for :blank. The name is verbose, but I don't think it matters since this pseudo-class doesn't seem like something that would see frequent use.

I'm not convinced that an empty-or-white-space pseudo-class should exist at all though. Such a pseudo-class would seem to encourage poor coding practices like the one shown in the spec: a paragraph element containing nothing aside from a line-break. Another poor-form construct that I've often seen involves putting non-breaking spaces in elements that could have otherwise been selected via the empty pseudo-class. Some such constructs like <td>&nbsp;</td> do have a use-case that might be worthy of accommodation by CSS, but I think that would be better done by adding a line-height property-based unit so that one can use code like <td/> in tandem with code like td:empty { min-height: 1lh; }.

I don't think blank is a good name for a pseudo-class referring to blank form fields though. I'd propose one of the following alternatives:

  * :blank-text-field, which is more intuitive.
  * :no-value, which adds utility that extends beyond text fields and makes the :indeterminate pseudo-class redundant.
  * :unmodified-by-user, which allows selection of text fields with default values that aren't an empty string and is more useful for elements like the HTML meter and select elements.