One thing that bothers me with CSS :nth-of-type
/:nth-child
selectors is that you can’t combine them with CSS classes. The selector below for example won’t work as you’d first expect it to work:
.bar:nth-child(2) {
color: red;
}
No, the selector above won’t color the second .bar
element red
, something I had somehow expected it to do. What the selector will target instead, is an element that is both .bar
and :nth-child(2)
:
See the Pen .class:nth-of-type by Bramus (@bramus) on CodePen.
🐛 This article previously wrongly assumed that the browser would somehow know that .bar
happens to be an article
element. That assumption was incorrect and this post has been adjusted to no longer contain this error. Thanks to @simevidas for pointing this out.
~
To solve my problem, I’d be needing something like a :nth-of-class
selector. Unfortunately no such selector exists nor is it currently proposed. What is proposed though, in the upcoming CSS Level 4 Selectors specification (aka “not CSS4” 😜), is an extension to the nth-child/nth-last-child
pseudo selectors: the ability to add an extra "of S"
part into those selectors.
The
:nth-child(An+B [of S]?)
pseudo-class notation represents elements that are amongAn+Bth
elements from the list composed of their inclusive siblings that match the selector listS
. IfS
is omitted, it defaults to*|*
.
Given that, our wanted :nth-of-class
selector becomes a reality:
article:nth-child(2 of .bar) {
color: red;
}
Here’s a pen with the result:
See the Pen .class:nth-of-type by Bramus (@bramus) on CodePen.
If you’re using Firefox or Chrome you’ll see that the demo above is broken, as browser support for it is bad. Only Safari supports it at the time of writing.
💡 Shown above is a dynamic CanIUse.com image, showing an always up-to-date support table. By the time you are reading this browser support might have become better.
Other browser that currently don’t support it have meta-issues to implement CSS Level 4 selectors:
- Chromium Bug #747818: [meta] CSS Selectors Level 4 support
- Bugzilla Bug #693083: [META] implement CSS Selectors Level 4 [selectors-4]
Please vote on those bugs mentioned above if you want those features to land in the browsers.
🗳 By massively voting on browser bugs we can “tell” a browser vendor that we’d like to see a certain feature land. Go forth and vote.
~
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