Instead of $el > el syntax, wouldn't a simple version be better?
* el < el
I've run into many situations over the years where being able to select parent elements based on a child would have come in handy. I think it would be a lot simpler to just use < for direct parents, as > is used for direct children.
A) Using < would cause parsing problems when the stylesheet is embedded in an enclosing HTML document. B) If you think about it, the selector is still functioning the same: you are simply moving which node is being "targeted"; I would therefore hope that you could also do "$el + el" to select nodes that came before other nodes. (edit: Reading the linked update to the specification, it seems like the people who wrote it did not see that this would be a useful, beautiful, and arguably important generalization; sigh.)
I'm confused by your comment: ">" only has special meaning in the context of a tag, or after "]]"; "<" has special meaning meaning anywhere in a document you are not inside of a tag.
that actually answered my question. I don't know the html spec that well so I didn't know if both "<" and ">" were reserved characters. From what I understand of what you're saying, it's only when ">" comes after a "<" that is has special meaning.
Correct. From the XML specification (which is easier to obtain than SGML, more prescriptive than HTML4, and capable of being understood by humans in a way the HTML5 "document IE" specification is unable to support), 2.4 "Character Data and Markup" (note the "may" and "MUST"):
The ampersand character (&) and the left angle bracket (<) MUST NOT appear in their literal form, except when used as markup delimiters, or within a comment, a processing instruction, or a CDATA section. If they are needed elsewhere, they MUST be escaped using either numeric character references or the strings " & " and " < " respectively.
The right angle bracket (>) may be represented using the string " > ", and MUST, for compatibility, be escaped using either " > " or a character reference when it appears in the string " ]]> " in content, when that string is not marking the end of a CDATA section.
I thought the same thing when I read about "$" and thought they should use "<" as you suggest. I don't like that the last element in a chain of css isn't the target.
* el < el
I've run into many situations over the years where being able to select parent elements based on a child would have come in handy. I think it would be a lot simpler to just use < for direct parents, as > is used for direct children.