Intent to Ship: CSS Custom Highlight Universal Selector ::highlight(*)

[Chromestatus]

Contact emails

seo...@chromium.org

Explainer

No information provided

Specification

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-pseudo-4/#selectordef-highlight-highlight-name-selector

Summary

Introduces a universal selector for custom highlights, ::highlight(*), which matches the highlight pseudo-elements of all custom highlights regardless of their name. The * argument contributes zero specificity, so its declarations act as a base style that rules naming a specific highlight override through the cascade.

Blink component

Blink>CSS

Web Feature ID

Missing feature

Motivation

Styling shared properties across custom highlights requires repeating the same declarations for every registered name. The CSSWG resolved to allow ::highlight(*).

Initial public proposal

https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/9091

Search tags

Custom Highlight

TAG review

No information provided

TAG review status

Pending

Goals for experimentation

None

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

No information provided

Gecko: Under consideration (https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1460)

WebKit: No signal (https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/728)

Web developers: No signals

Other signals:

WebView application risks

Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?

No information provided

Debuggability

No information provided

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and Android WebView)?

Yes

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?

Yes

Flag name on about://flags

No information provided

Finch feature name

No information provided

Non-finch justification

No information provided

Rollout plan

Will ship enabled for all users

Requires code in //chrome?

False

Tracking bug

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/408003366

Estimated milestones

Shipping on desktop	158
Shipping on Android	158
Shipping on WebView	158

Anticipated spec changes

Open questions about a feature may be a source of future web compat or interop issues. Please list open issues (e.g. links to known github issues in the project for the feature specification) whose resolution may introduce web compat/interop risk (e.g., changing to naming or structure of the API in a non-backward-compatible way).

No information provided

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/5174965228929024?gate=6101897755885568

Links to previous Intent discussions

Intent to Prototype: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/6a7e62a2.2164c308.b1fa7.0128.GAE%40google.com

This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.

[Alex Russell]

As discussed at API OWNERS, it seems strange that we don't have any developer interest for this. Presumably folks are asking for this, right?

[Seokho Song]

Hi Alex. 

Yes, there’s been interest. Signals so far:

• Thomas Steiner tried ::highlight(*) before it existed, to share text-decoration declarations across spelling and punctuation highlights.
• Bramus supported the syntax in the same issue, citing ::view-transition-group(*) as precedent. On Bluesky he called it “the one remaining thing with custom highlights that I found missing”.
• Indirectly, MDN’s ::highlight() example repeats text-decoration.
• Custom highlights have no UA default style, so today every name needs its own rule.

Additionally, Mozilla engineers emilio and jnjaeschke consider it reasonable in the standards-positions issue.

[Alex Russell]

Thank you for giving us a sense of the demand. LGTM1.

[Dan Clark]

LGTM2

[Mike Taylor]

LGTM3

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