Cassidy Williams

Software Engineer in Chicago

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A use-case for CSS :has()


In case you missed it, the CSS :has() selector is now supported in all major browsers!

It’s a very weird (but cool) selector that allows you to select elements that contain a specific thing, like for example a:has(img) selects all anchor <a> tags that have an <img> inside.

I’ve thought it was really interesting, but I’ve never actually had a good use-case to use it myself besides… adding captions to images or something. But, that changed today!

On my personal website (which I first made a solid 4 years ago with plain HTML, CSS, and JS, and I admit I haven’t really updated since besides some words and links), I have a dark mode toggle. It’s probably rarely if ever clicked (I should probably modernize it with some prefers-color-scheme stuff sometime), but when you do, it does what you expect, it turns on dark mode.

Under the hood, that toggle adds a .dark-mode class to the <body>, and in the CSS, we style nearly everything based on that:

html,
body {
	/* ... */
	background: var(--white);
	color: var(--black);
}

body.dark-mode,
body.dark-mode a {
	background: var(--black);
	color: var(--white);
}

/* ... */

Now, here’s the problem: the body doesn’t always take up the entire height of the page. I was cleaning up and organizing some code, and when I put the background and color properties under html, body, that meant that the html was keeping its white background and black text color, even in dark mode.

Light things on dark mode

BUT :has() came to my rescue! Because it kind of acts like a parent selector, I’m able to say “if the <html> has .dark-mode inside of it, that means it should have certain styles.” One line change later we had this:

html:has(.dark-mode),
body.dark-mode,
body.dark-mode a {
	background: var(--black);
	color: var(--white);
}

…and voilà, just like that, all of my problems I’ve ever had are solved!


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