sass-site/source/documentation/breaking-changes/bogus-combinators.liquid

---
title: 'Breaking Change: Invalid Combinators'
introduction: >
  Sass has historically been very permissive about the use of leading, trailing,
  and repeated combinators in selectors. These combinators are being deprecated
  except where they're useful for nesting.
---

{% markdown %}
  Sass has historically supported three invalid uses of combinators:

  * Leading combinators, as in `+ .error {color: red}`.

  * Trailing combinators, as in `.error + {color: red}`.

  * Repeated combinators, as in `div > > .error {color: red}`.

  None of these are valid CSS, and all of them will cause browsers to ignore the
  style rule in question. Supporting them added a substantial amount of
  complexity to Sass's implementation, and made it particularly difficult to fix
  various bugs related to the `@extend` rule. As such, we [made the decision] to
  remove support for these uses.

  [made the decision]: https://github.com/sass/sass/issues/3340

  **There is one major exception**: leading and trailing combinators may still
  be used for nesting purposes. For example, the following is still very much
  supported:
{% endmarkdown %}

{% codeExample 'bogus-combinators' %}
  .sidebar > {
    .error {
      color: red;
    }
  }
  ===
  .sidebar >
    .error
      color: red
{% endcodeExample %}

{% markdown %}
  Sass will only produce an error if a selector still has a leading or trailing
  combinator _after nesting is resolved_. Repeated combinators, on the other
  hand, will always be errors.

  To make sure existing stylesheets who (likely accidentally) contain invalid
  combinators, we'll support a transition period until the next major release of
  Dart Sass.

  ## Transition Period

  {% compatibility 'dart: "1.54.0"', 'libsass: false', 'ruby: false' %}{% endcompatibility %}

  First, we'll emit deprecation warnings for all double combinators, as well as
  leading or trailing combinators that end up in selectors after nesting is
  resolved.

  {% render 'doc_snippets/silence-deprecations' %}

  In addition, we'll immediately start omitting selectors that we know to be
  invalid CSS from the compiled CSS, with one exception: we _won't_ omit
  selectors that begin with a leading combinator, since they may be used from a
  nested `@import` rule or `meta.load-css()` mixin. However, we don't encourage
  this pattern and will drop support for it in Dart Sass 2.0.0.
{% endmarkdown %}