Question

I’m having a heck of a time with this particular CSS selector which does not want to work when I add :not(:empty) to it. It seems to work fine with any combination of the other selectors:

input:not(:empty):not(:focus):invalid { border-color: #A22; box-shadow: none }

If I remove the :not(:empty) part, it works just fine. Even if I change the selector to input:not(:empty) it still won’t select input fields which have text typed into them. Is this broken or am I just not allowed to use :empty within a :not() selector?

The only other thing I can think of is that browsers are still saying that the element is empty because it has no children, just a “value” per say. Does the :empty selector not have separate functionality for an input element versus a regular element? This doesn’t seem probable though because using :empty on a field and typing something into it will cause the alternate effects to go away (because it is no longer empty).

Tested in Firefox 8 and Chrome.

Answer 1

Being a void element, an <input> element is considered empty by the HTML definition of “empty”, since the content model of all void elements is always empty. So they will always match the :empty pseudo-class, whether or not they have a value. This is also why their value is represented by an attribute in the start tag, rather than text content within start and end tags.

Also, from the Selectors spec:

The :empty pseudo-class represents an element that has no children at all. In terms of the document tree, only element nodes and content nodes (such as DOM text nodes, CDATA nodes, and entity references) whose data has a non-zero length must be considered as affecting emptiness;

Consequently, input:not(:empty) will never match anything in a proper HTML document. (It would still work in a hypothetical XML document that defines an <input> element that can accept text or child elements.)

I don’t think you can style empty <input> fields dynamically using just CSS (i.e. rules that apply whenever a field is empty, and don’t once text is entered). You can select initially empty fields if they have an empty value attribute (input[value=""]) or lack the attribute altogether (input:not([value])), but that’s about it.