I have to believe this topic has been broached before, but why does GWT not contain any kind of CSS selector engine?
More and more I am using GWT to build JavaScript API tools for this that or the other, and often this means integration with non-GWT code (read: hand-written HTML, CSS and JavaScript). Tool kits like JQuery and Dojo provide great helper methods for manipulating the DOM via CSS selectors - a feature that is distinctly absent from GWT. And yet, because of the vast differences in browser support for various CSS selector methods (and CSS support itself), it seems like a perfect fit for GWT, given the deferred binding capabilities the compiler offers. I do not believe GWT needs to support all the fancy helper "shortcut" methods that other toolkits provide. Most of the extra features like animation already have reasonable equivalents in GWT, and JQuery's method chaining is just a hard-to-read way of minifying your code - something GWT also already does. :-) Probably my favorite CSS engine right now is Sizzle JS (http:// sizzlejs.com/) and I can't imagine it would be hard to write GWT bindings for this library (it has three public methods in the API!). In fact, if I can't find them with a quick Google search, maybe I'll start a new project to do so. The bindings would be a good start, but this is definitely a feature I'd like to see get first-class support in GWT. -- http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors
