Scope Selector Nuance

Published on:

November 27, 2023

Categories:

CSS Scopes³, CSS Nesting⁴, CSS⁵⁵

Current drink:

Coffee

In yesterday’s “weekly” I shared the new MDN docs page for @scope — a new CSS feature currently only available in Chromium-based browsers.

Looking at it made me remember one issue that I had with the @scope, which was actually intended. I imagine this might be something many people would stumble upon, so here I am, sharing it.

The issue might appear if you’d try to use a selector that would have a mention of a wrapper that exists outside the scope, like this:

@scope (.my-scope) {
	.inner {
		background: var(--PINK);
	}
	.outer .inner {
		background: var(--GREEN);
	}
}

<div class="outer">
	<div class="my-scope">
		<div class="inner">Hello?</div>
	</div>
</div>

The .inner element now has the pink background — not green. It might be easy to think that it would match if you’d think of scope as of something similar to a media or container query: we really care only about the target element, and the .inner is both inside our scope, and inside the .outer, right?

But the issue is: scopes behave closer to native CSS nesting: anything inside would be as if it were nested inside an implicit :scope element!

Let me quote the corresponding section from the abovementioned MDN docs:

In the context of a @scope block, the :scope pseudo-class represents the scope root — it provides an easy way to apply styles to the scope root itself, from inside the scope.

In fact, :scope is implicitly prepended to all scoped style rules. If you want, you can explicitly prepend :scope or prepend the nesting selector (&) to get the same effect if you find these representations easier to understand.

So what we get in the end is :scope .outer .inner — and, of course, we don’t have the .outer inside our scope! But we can easily confirm this by modifying HTML:

<div class="my-scope">
	<div class="outer">
		<div class="inner">Hello!</div>
	</div>
</div>

Now, the .inner element has the green background.

How can we fix this? There are, actually, multiple ways to do so, all using different ways we can create selectors:

<div class="outer">
	<div class="my-scope">
		<div class="inner inner1">With an ampersand</div>
		<div class="inner inner2">With a :scope</div>
		<div class="inner inner3">Using nesting</div>
		<div class="inner inner4">Using :is()</div>
	</div>
</div>

@scope (.my-scope) {
	.outer & .inner1,
	.outer :scope .inner2 {
		background: var(--GREEN);
	}
	.inner3 {
		.outer & {
			background: var(--GREEN);
		}
	}
	/* Not entirely correct */
	.inner4:is(.outer *) {
		background: var(--GREEN);
	}
}

The “proper” way to fix this is to just explicitly mention the scope — either by & or :scope. This way there won’t be anything implicit added, similar to how & works in native CSS nesting!

The third example is something that works because the :scope would be added to the topmost selector, so when the native CSS nesting would expand, it would become .outer :scope .inner3 essentially.

The fourth case is interesting, and not entirely a substitute to others. While it works, it is actually wider than you might think: it would also include the case when the .outer is inside the .my-scope or even if both classes are present on the same element:

<div class="outer">
	<div class="my-scope">
		<div class="inner inner4">Outside</div>
	</div>
</div>
<div class="my-scope">
	<div class="outer">
		<div class="inner inner4">Inside</div>
	</div>
</div>
<div class="my-scope outer">
	<div class="inner inner4">Mixed</div>
</div>

This is because of how what is inside the :is() does not really care about any nesting that the element already has — it just checks if the target element is also nested inside the .outer element.

While this is not a one-to-one to what we intended, knowing this behavior can be useful in other cases.

We cannot use CSS scopes right now, only play with them in Chromium-based browsers, but when they would become more widely available, hopefully knowing this nuance will help you.