Question

Why jQuery has no :readonly selector?

There are :checked and :selected and :disabled selectors for inputs. So, why there is no :readonly selector? I mean, as a “coding sugar”.

Because all these square brackets are ugly — “.is(‘[readonly]’)”. Why no “.is(‘:readonly’)”?

Maybe there is some reason why :readonly selector doesn’t exist?

Answer 1

This enhancement was denied in: http://bugs.jquery.com/ticket/2497

Reason given:

See above for the solution. Adding new pseudos isn’t a good idea
because they throw console warnings in Firefox / Safari / Chrome due
to the use of querySelectorAll

To see for yourself:

document.querySelector(":readonly")
//Error: SYNTAX_ERR: DOM Exception 12

You could use :read-only, though I’m not sure of the support:

http://jsfiddle.net/YGuNG/

Works in chrome but not in firefox.