How Can I Access the Style Properties of CSS Pseudo-elements with jQuery?

Accessing Style Properties of Pseudo-Elements with jQuery

Given the limitations of traversing through CSS rules, this article explores using jQuery selectors to locate elements with specific effects caused by pseudo-element rules.

For instance, consider an element:

.commentarea .author:before {
    background-image: url(http://...);
    background-position: -9999px -9999px;
}

which may be modified selectively:

.author[href$="gbacon"]:before /* ... */ {
  content: "";
  background-position: 0 -140px
}

To select pseudo-elements with their default background positions, the following selector syntax does not work:

$(".commentarea .author:before")

Similarly, attempts to use .siblings() to find elements with specific background images return empty results.

The crux of the issue lies in the nature of pseudo-elements. They do not have independent selectors and instead modify the surrounding elements. In other words, :before and :after do not select; they modify.

For example, in the HTML:

<span>

and CSS:

.a .b:before {
    content: "|Inserted using :before|";
}

the text "|Inserted using :before|" is inserted before the inner span element because class b is a descendant of class a. This demonstrates that pseudo-elements do not have their own selectors but affect their parent elements.

Therefore, it is not possible to directly select pseudo-elements using standard jQuery selector syntax. One potential solution is to utilize a jQuery plugin like jQueryRule (http://flesler.blogspot.com/2007/11/jqueryrule.html) to extract the original CSS rule.

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