FWIW CSS now has “:has” which provides a form of general purpose predication, although afaik it still doesn’t have a :contains (that was proposed for CSS3 or so

FWIW CSS now has “:has” which provides a form of general purpose predication, although afaik it still doesn’t have a :contains (that was proposed for CSS3 or something but I don’t think it got accepted). A huge part of XPath’s power though, and something you AFAIK can’t do in browsers, is extensibility. For instance selecting an element on the basis of a class is absolute hell in XPath 1.0 (and not great in 2.0 either, XPath 3.1’s `contains-token` finally made that not hell). But server-side you don’t care because pretty much all implementations allow installing your own functions so you can add your own `contains-token` or even `has-class` predicate and be on your way.