Children selectors

[jenstornell]

To prevent repetition both in CSS and HTML we can use a component. However, when working with static lists it may not be a good idea to have every list item as a component.

A simplified example below:

<ul>
  <li class="bg-red-500 hover:bg-red-700 rounded text-sm text-white">Home</li>
  <li class="bg-red-500 hover:bg-red-700 rounded text-sm text-white">About</li>
  <li class="bg-red-500 hover:bg-red-700 rounded text-sm text-white">Projects</li>
  <li class="bg-red-500 hover:bg-red-700 rounded text-sm text-white">Hello</li>
  <li class="bg-red-500 hover:bg-red-700 rounded text-sm text-white">World</li>
  <li class="bg-red-500 hover:bg-red-700 rounded text-sm text-white">Foo</li>
  <li class="bg-red-500 hover:bg-red-700 rounded text-sm text-white">Bar</li>
  <li class="bg-red-500 hover:bg-red-700 rounded text-sm text-white">Tail</li>
  <li class="bg-red-500 hover:bg-red-700 rounded text-sm text-white">Wind</li>
<ul>

For static lists like this you could split the data into an array and keep the classes as a variable. It's a bit more hassle and not always as readable.

Solution - Child selectors

Let's take the first example again:

<ul class="bg-red-500> hover:bg-red-700> rounded> text-sm> text-white>">
  <li>Home</li>
  <li>About</li>
  <li>Projects</li>
  <li>Hello</li>
  <li>World</li>
  <li>Foo</li>
  <li>Bar</li>
  <li>Tail</li>
  <li>Wind</li>
<ul>

1. When need to change a class, you only do that in one place.
2. It should only affect direct children, not grand children.
3. Children classes on the li should override the child class set in the ul.
4. I put > last as class names needs to start with a letter.
5. Very similar to the current Tailwind syntax.

Cons

I can only come up with one con at the moment.

1. It would probably double the filesize of the CSS file before purge.

[royvanv]

I think > is the worst character to use, to be fair. Something like children:bg-red-500 would be my preference.

Also, in your example both text-sm and text-white can be set on the parent <ul> tag and need no child selector class.

[jenstornell]

I had children: in my first draft. There are two reasons why I changed my mind:

1. The line of classes was getting quite long.
2. It collides with hover: for example children:hover:bg-red-500.

Note that because of how these screen variants are implemented in Tailwind you can't combine breakpoints with dark mode using this approach, for example md:dark:text-gray-300 won't work. This is something we're hoping to address with official dark mode support in a future release.

https://tailwindcss.com/docs/breakpoints/

Because > is also part of a HTML tag, that character may not be perfect. What about @?

<ul class="@hover:bg-red-500"></ul>

You are however right about that text-white is inherited. I just added a bunch of classes to illustrate my point. Real scenarios elements will have a different set of classes.

[royvanv]

1. The line of classes was getting quite long.

If it bothers you, you could always use @apply in your preprocessed CSS.

2. It collides with hover: for example children:hover:bg-red-500.

Note that because of how these screen variants are implemented in Tailwind you can't combine breakpoints with dark mode using this approach, for example md:dark:text-gray-300 won't work. This is something we're hoping to address with official dark mode support in a future release.

https://tailwindcss.com/docs/breakpoints/

This seems to only apply to breakpoints, as they are both relying on a media query.

I would still prefer the prefix children, as it seems more in line with Tailwind's other class names.

[nternetinspired]

Text colour and size are inherited, why not just set them on the parent?

<ul class="text-sm text-white">
  <li class="bg-red-500 hover:bg-red-700 rounded"></li>
  <li class="bg-red-500 hover:bg-red-700 rounded"></li>
</ul>

[adamwathan]

No plans to add this to core right now, instead I would recommend using this plugin:

https://github.com/benface/tailwindcss-children

Can revisit this some time in the future if there is an overwhelming demand for it 👍

[HenrijsS]

Well that seems unfortunate.
Is there an option to just use @apply for the children? For example:

ul {
  li {
    @apply flex;
  }
}

[royvanv]

You could use postcss-nested to nest selector similar to SCSS/SASS.

[jenstornell]

@HenrijsS I use https://www.npmjs.com/package/postcss-nesting because then it uses the syntax that probably will be implemented as native CSS in the future.

ul {
  & li {
    @apply flex;
  }
}

[ixartz]

No plans to add this to core right now, instead I would recommend using this plugin:

https://github.com/benface/tailwindcss-children

Can revisit this some time in the future if there is an overwhelming demand for it 👍

@adamwathan, in tailwind 2.2, you've introduced the peer selector: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/just-in-time-mode#sibling-selector-variants

Why not children selector in JIT mode?

There are some reference #3922 and #277 about children selector with JIT mode.

[adamwathan]

Not opposed to it just takes some set aside time to properly design the best version of that feature. The "peer" feature for example wasn't a 5 minute thing, and is miles different in terms of how it works and the power it affords than the way anyone had implemented that before in plugins or any of the Tailwind spin-off projects out there.

Have a bunch of other higher priority work right now but definitely can think about it again when there's time.

[deadcoder0904]

Cool @adamwathan 👍

Take a look at my use-case using CSS Grid under the answer's comment where it'll be helpful to me -> https://stackoverflow.com/a/68509649/6141587

[benjaminhoffman]

For those that came here from nextjs by trying to style your Image component, I found these resources helpful:

• https://www.peterlunch.com/snippets/next-image-styling
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64846858/how-to-use-tailwind-css-with-next-js-image
• next/image Styling vercel/next.js#18312
• https://tailwindcss.com/docs/just-in-time-mode#built-in-important-modifier

[timothyis]

Just to add an idea to this thread, I just wanted to add some classes to all anchors inside of a nav element and would have found this feature really helpful if there was some kind of child combinator "modifier" (quotes because, I was thinking of it like you can use hover: etc.

Might be a cool idea in the future to do something like:
child:bg-sky-600 translates into something like selector > * { background: rgb(14 165 233/var(--tw-bg-opacity)) }

[Arturexe]

Tailwind needs a child selector. It would make life so much easier.

[RobinMalfait]

@Arturexe here is a quick little plugin you can add if you need this behaviour: https://play.tailwindcss.com/h7eDGStsE9?file=config

[josias-r]

With TW 3.1, it's now also possible using arbitrary variants:
https://tailwindcss.com/docs/hover-focus-and-other-states#using-arbitrary-variants

[HenrijsS]

With TW 3.1, it's now also possible using arbitrary variants: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/hover-focus-and-other-states#using-arbitrary-variants

Don't know how I missed this. Looks amazing!

The problem is that it's not available through search, so I managed to miss it.

[Sleepful]

arbitrary variants allows Descendant combinator by using a _ instead of a (white space). It's in the docs but took me a while to find.