CSS WG Blog Selectors is a Proposed Recommendation

Selectors is a Proposed Recommendation

Many thanks to all who helped with comments, tests, and implementations!
The Selectors specification was just advanced to Proposed Recommendation
by the W3C Director. That means that the specification has successfully
passed public review and has been sufficiently implemented to no longer
need a status as Candidate Recommendation (which is also known as “call
for implementations”).

Currently, the W3C members are reviewing the specification one last
time. Of course, we think we have done our job well and they won’t find
anything wrong. They have a little over a month for that task.

However, the specification will not immediately become a W3C
Recommendation at the end of the review period. That is because
Selectors has normative references in its bibliography to
CSS 2.1 and to
the CSS Namespaces
module, and so it was decided that those have to
become Recommendations first. That ensures that W3C Recommendations are
as stable as possible, by only depending on other Recommendations.

A bit of history: Selectors became Candidate Recommendation already in
2001, but a couple of proposed features (‘:contains’, ‘::selection’)
were never implemented and turned out to be difficult enough that we
abandoned them for now. To fix the draft with respect to those problems,
a new working draft was made in 2005, which was updated one last time
earlier this year.

You can see the last changes we made to the specification in the
disposition of comments. Nothing major changed, but a number of
descriptions were improved.

The CSS Validator supports Selectors level 3

The CSS Validator implements the latest Selectors. To check a style sheet, it is enough to choose “CSS level 3” as the profile in the Web interface.

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