Austin Cheney wrote:
> Scott Sauyet wrote:
>> how often do we really need to target something that can't be
>> expressed with CSS?
>
> All the time. How can I target the following with CSS?
>
> * parent
Can't do this, by design. This would be the primary advantage to
XPath
> * last child
p span:last-child
> * prior sibling
Can't do this, by design.
> * next sibling
p + *
> * first n named child of parent j
p > span:first-child
> * third n named child of parent j
p > span:nth-child(42)
> * first descendant of any name with attribute n and attribute value j
I don't know how to do this exactly, but this will get all such
descendents, in document order, so you can easily then select the
first one: p *[n='j']
> * first element where name contains "abc"
Can't be done, probably not by design, but because it's a very strange
request. But you can do this with attribute values.>
> Name, in the above examples, refers to element name and not HTML name
> Attribute.
> As far as I know you can't do any of these with CSS, and the first is
> absolutely essential. I am pretty sure all these are immediately
> achievable in XPath. I need most of those pretty frequently and have to
> write conditional code in JavaScript loops to achieve some of these that
> XPath performs in a single simple expression that is faster to execute.
The only one of your list that I miss is parent. And that only
rarely.
> I bet you need most of those too and probably just don't consider it as
> a selector when you are forced to write some amount of nested logic to
> accomplish similar objectives where such logic looks nothing like a
> selector.
On the other hand, can you find any better way to mimic `p.foo` than
the following?:
//p[contains(concat(' ',normalize-space(@class),' '),' foo ')]
:-)
-- Scott
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