What ELSE is on your CSS wishlist?

What else do we want or need CSS to do? It’s like being out late at night someplace you shouldn’t be and a stranger in a trenchcoat walks up and whispers in your ear.

“Psst. You wanna buy some async @imports? I’ve got the specificity you want.”

You know you shouldn’t entertain the idea but you do it anyway. All your friends doing Cascade Layers. What are you, a square?

I keep thinking of how amazing it is to write CSS today. There was an email exchange just this morning where I was discussing a bunch of ideas for a persistent set of controls in the UI that would have sounded bonkers even one year ago if it wasn’t for new features, like anchor positioning, scroll timelines, auto-height transitions, and popovers. We’re still in the early days of all these things — among many, many more — and have yet to see all the awesome possibilities come to fruition. Exciting times!

Chris kept a CSS wishlist, going back as far as 2013 and following up on it in 2019. We all have things we’d like to see CSS do and we always will no matter how many sparkly new features we get. Let’s revisit the ones from 2013:

1. ✅ “I’d like to be able to select an element based on if it contains another particular selector.” Hello, :has()!
2. ❌ “I’d like to be able to select an element based on the content it contains.”
3. ❌ “I’d like multiple pseudo-elements.”
4. ✅ “I’d like to be able to animate/transition something to height: auto;” Yep, we got that!