CSS selector for targeting only immediate children and not other identical descendants
ul > lionly does the immediate children. So, for example, to do only the top level list elements you could use:
#parent > liNote: this isn't supported on IE6.
The common workaround for backwards compatibility is to do something like this:
#parent li { /* style appropriately */ }#parent li li { /* back to normal */ }It's more tedious because you have to apply styles and then turn them off (and you may not necessarily know what the old values are) but it's the only IE6-friendly pure CSS workaround there is.
Edit: Ok you have a MooTools specific issue. getElements() returns all descendants, not just immediate children. Try using getChildren().
var drop = function(el){ el.getParents('ul').reverse().each(function(item){ var posCount = 1; item.getChildren("li").getElements("a span[class=position]").each(function(pos){ pos.set('text', posCount); posCount++; }); });}or something like that.
The original question was not answered. :only-child only works if the only-child has no descendant children. The original post suggested that the inclusion of descendant children was due to ul>li whereas it is in fact due to a bug in :only-child. Paradoxically :first-child selects the first child in a list with descendant children, as does last-child, but :only-child does not. I checked this in Firefox, Opera and Chrome. Here is an example:
<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en"><head><meta charset="utf-8"><style>.list>ul>li:only-child {color:red}.list>ul>li:first-child {color:green}.list>ul>li:last-child {color:blue}</style></head><body><div class="list"><ul><li>Item one</li><ul><l>Subitem one</li><li>Subitem two</li></ul></li><!--<li>Item two</li><li>Item three</li>--></ul></div></body></html>To activate :first-child and :last-child rules uncomment the last two items. The implementation of the Selectors Level 3 standard is thus inconsistent in major browsers. The :first-child rule should not be activated when there is an :only-child rule and a unique child has descendants. In the example the only-child should be red but it is green.