css not class select?

Question

Theres a mistake in my rather large demo where i assume all the divs under the class special will be used to align something. Now i realize i need to add an extra div outside of the part i want to align but inside of .special.

How do i write .special div[NOT someclass] ? or is there no way to do this and i need to rewrite a lot of html?

Answer 1

I would go with jQuery or some other Javascript Framework, the selectors just rock and NOT class XY is rather easy to achieve. As Pekka pointed out I am not sure what brothers you want to target. getElementsByClassName() is implemented by almost all browsers (you know which one doesn't work, don't you?).

I found a rather nifty solution on devshed to also make it work in IE:

onload=function(){
if (document.getElementsByClassName == undefined) {
    document.getElementsByClassName = function(className)
    {
        var hasClassName = new RegExp("(?:^|\\s)" + className + "(?:$|\\s)");
        var allElements = document.getElementsByTagName("*");
        var results = [];

        var element;
        for (var i = 0; (element = allElements[i]) != null; i++) {
            var elementClass = element.className;
            if (elementClass && elementClass.indexOf(className) != -1 && hasClassName.test(elementClass))
                results.push(element);
        }

        return results;
    }
}
}

All you need to do now is to iterate through all your div classes and negate the one you DON'T want.

Answer 2

CSS3 includes the not() selector. The only problem is (you guessed it) no IE compatibility. If you're willing to require Javascript from IE <9 users, you can get IE compatibility with IE9.js.

Answer 3

+1 to both answers above. I'll add i was able to get away with some things but writing this in the css block to undo the effect

some-type: inherit;