Also, you would still can’t automatically mark text-only links, you would be doing that manually.

Looks like this:

<a href=”#” rel=”nofollow”>Text</a>

So maybe you could use this:

a[target='_blank'] {}

I know it doesn’t solve the problem, but it’s good enough for me anyway.

To the person who said + isnt yet used: its used for sibling selections.

I have exactly the same desire as you for usercontent control of “text-node”

but in light of the ever-desired parent selector, wouldn’t you also want to textnode style your inner=tag example: <a href=”#”>some <strong>other</strong> text</a>
??
if you don’t want your inner <strong> to take on the textnode style, you can restyle it via accepted child selector:
a>strong {blahhh:blahh;}
[now hoping the this comment thingie takes encoding etc as intended]

But the CSS is hiding the sub nav items when the page loads so it should be able to traverse backwards from the A:focus to the LI sort of like:

li << a:focus ul { display : block;}

This could say: Pass the focus from the a and re-cascade from the li downwards, even reading it as a human that makes sense as the direction is clearly shown.

Anyway without getting confused, cascading backwards while being really useful for navigation systems, is another buzzword or phrase to wow our peers with. “Have you tried the reverse cascade trick?”. If only we could do it for nav systems it would free use from JS.

I don’t think that would work, I’m trying to select the ‘a’ element based on it’s contents, not selecting the contents.

What you suggest would mean you’re styling the contents, and that you would need an element within it (not just text).

a > +:first-child { ... }

a *:not(img)

Would select any element inside a link that isn’t an image. Which might work in your circumstances (e.g. if you have a strong element inside the link), but not for me, because there is no other element inside the link, it’s just text.

Therefore this won’t be selected by your selector:

<a href='page.html'>example<a>

Conceptually, what we need is a variation of E:empty that is for text nodes, e.g. E:text or E:no-children.

#contents a *:not(img) {
color:black;
text-decoration:none;
border: 1px dotted #ccc;
}