Can you elaborate or is this just an uninformed rant?
The article that you are commenting on explicitly mentions the focus on performance while considering this feature. They even state to have been able to achieve "fantastic performance, even in the presence of large DOM trees and large numbers of :has() selectors".
With all due respect, it looks to me you're the one sharing an uninformed opinion. Have you seen any benchmarks, tried some? No? Your claims are based on what the authors say. That is not enough. Never has been.
The idea is not new at all. People have been asking for something like this for many years. You know why it never happened? Because it would be slow. Maybe the webkit devs have found a really fast and clever way to do it. But shitting on people for voicing their well founded skepticism is not a good sign. Especially when all we have is their word.
I was neither sharing an opinion nor did I claim anything. I asked OP to elaborate and referred them to content of the article.
> You know why it never happened?
Yes, I do.
> Especially when all we have is their word.
Does that mean you don't trust their word? Good. Would you trust their own benchmark? No? The parent selector has been in Safari 15.4 since March, 2022. So feel free to do your own benchmark. There is not just their word.
Being skeptic is not a bad thing. But (uninformed) criticism without any specifics is far from "well founded skepticism". JavaScript interpreters used to be very slow twenty years ago, now they are extremely fast. That can happen to CSS evaluation, too.
March 2022 you say? Great. Are there any benchmarks? Nothing fancy, just some 3rd party comparisons to other selectors or combinations. Because that would be preferable to buying myself a safari capable device just to prove point that I wasn't making in the first place
I'm not aware of any benchmarks. Neither am I aware of any performance deterioration in Safari 15.4+.
What is your point exactly? That performance should be one of the most important aspects in browser engine development? I agree. Hence, I asked OP to elaborate their claim that this selector harms slow devices. And I'm not interested in the (outdated?) historical concerns of a parent selector. But the actual effect of the specific selector implementation in WebKit which this discussion is about.
The article that you are commenting on explicitly mentions the focus on performance while considering this feature. They even state to have been able to achieve "fantastic performance, even in the presence of large DOM trees and large numbers of :has() selectors".