Custom Pseudo Elements via New pseudo-before/pseudo-after Attribute
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Description
Problem Statement:
• It's common to want to add a series of icons to an element, often derived from attributes. Each icon usually needs to be a separate element for UI reasons.
• Currently, you would have to actually create an element for each icon. It is tempting to use pseudo-elements for this since they are lightweight, but we're limited to before/after.
Proposal:
• Introduce two new HTML attributes: pseudo-before, pseudo-after. Their values are a space separated list of strings, like class. A pseudo element is created for each delimited string, with that string being the name of the pseudo element for CSS purposes. The -before/-after suffix is to control where in the DOM they appear.
Example:
<icons pseudo-before="checkmark thumbs-up star">
:checkmark
:thumbs-up
:star
<button>Reply</button>
</icons>
CSS
:checkmark,:thumbs-up,:star { ... }
:checkmark { content: '✅'; }
:thumbs-up { content: '👍'; }
:star { content: '⭐'; }
Implementation Notes:
• Requiring HTML markup for this might help with engine optimizations.
• This largely clones the before/after pseudo element implementation, so I'm hoping it's not too far fetched.
• The order of the pseudo elements is the same as they appear in the attribute. This can be overridden with grid/flex as usual.
• By using an attribute to spawn them, I don't foresee any paradoxes or loops caused by :has().
Other Notes:
• Hyphen/underscore should be allowed in the pseudo element name for legibility reasons, but probably not as the first character.
• This is more of an HTML proposal, but the CSS side is what makes it viable.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by reviewing the existing before/after pseudo-element behavior and the CSSWG issue discussion. Resolve the proposed attribute syntax, pseudo-element naming, ordering, CSS behavior, and interaction with :has(). Done means an agreed specification change for pseudo-before and pseudo-after, rather than an implementation based only on this proposal.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- css, html
- Domain
- frontend, web-dev
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100