PostCSS misconceptions

A few days ago, the following quote popped up on my screen: Five years on …this still doesn’t exist; this is still something that every single web designer/developer I know is crying out for. How do we make :parent happen?Polyfill? Post-CSS? A WC3 community group? It’s Jeremy Keith rooting for the parent selector in CSS in a comment made in Remy Sharp’s blog. A feature developers have been awaiting for ages, but which seemingly will not to land in our browsers anytime soon. I nodded at the first suggestion made by Jeremy (a Polyfill), but questioned how the second one would even be possible to realise. PostCSS is a good way to optimise existing CSS code, but how can we add functionality in CSS by just modifying syntax? With this question raised, Andrey’s talk from CSSConf now up and online on Youtube, and the A List Apart preprocessor panel discussion mentioning PostCSS and transpiling, I slowly realised the following: The idea of postprocessing finally has reached developers, but its scope is still a myth to some.