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Cascade & Inheritance Level 6 defines scoped styles – allowing authors to provide bounded ranges for selector-matching, and give priority to more ‘proximate’ scope origins.

There are many overlapping and sometimes contradictory features that can live under the concept of “scope” in CSS – but they divide roughly into two approaches:

  1. Total isolation of a component DOM subtree/fragment from the host page, so that no selectors get in or out unless explicitly requested.
  2. Lighter-touch, style-driven namespacing, and prioritization of “proximity” when resolving the cascade.

That has lead to a wide range of proposals over the years, including an old scope specification that was never implemented. Focus moved to Shadow-DOM, which is mainly concerned with approach #1 – full isolation. Meanwhile authors have attempted to handle approach #2 through convoluted naming conventions (like BEM) and JS tooling (such as CSS Modules, Styled Components, & Vue Scoped Styles).

In Cascade Level 6 we are developing a new native CSS approach to scope.

Timeline & Documents

Browser Support

A prototype of @scope is available in Chrome Canary with the Experimental Web Platform Features flag enabled.

8 ‘css scope’ episodes

2021

| podcast

What’s Happening in CSS & Sass @ Front End Nerdery

A podcast focusing on front end development but also covering a wide range of web development and design topics. We talked about CSS, Sass, and work being done in the W3C CSS Working Group.

| podcast

CSSWG, Container Queries, Scope, and Layers @ Word Wrap Show

I talk with Claire and Steph about my journey into webdev and onto the CSSWG, what I find frustrating about how others use CSS, and the three specs I’m working on.

| podcast

Container Queries & the CSSWG @ The F-Word

I chat with Bruce Lawson & Vadim Makeev about Sass & Susy, CSS Layers & compatibility, Container Queries, and the CSS Working Group.

2020