How are media queries counted in IE's CSS selectors limit?

Question

Any idea how does IE treat media queries regarding this CSS selector limit?

Does it see it as a single CSS rule or it sees it as 1 rule (the @media declaration) + number of rules inside the @media rule?

This being for IE9 as from what i know IE9 is the only IE that supports media queries while also having this issue with 4095 selectors.

I'm trying to write a tool to split the CSS accordingly and I'm not sure how to count the rules, as in a @media rule will be counted as 1 or will be counted as 1 + nr of rules inside?

Answer 1

It appears that media queries are not included in the selector limit. All rules within all media queries are counted though.

I wrote a test that performs a binary search to find the turning point where the last selector is ignored. It is available at https://robwu.nl/s/css-selector-limit-test.html. The binary search runs over the range 0 - 4200 and reports how often the input selector fits until the last selector is not applied any more. If the result is greater than 4096, the test case reports "infinity".

Results:

Turning point at 4095 for: #DUMMY{color:red;}
Turning point at 4095 for: @media screen(min-width:9px) { #DUMMY {color:red;} }
Turning point at 2047 for: @media screen(min-width:9px) { #DUMMY, #DUMMY {color:red;} }
Turning point at 1023 for: @media screen(min-width:9px) { #DUMMY {color:red;} #DUMMY, #DUMMY, #DUMMY {color:red;} }
Turning point at 1364 for: @media screen(min-width:9px) { #DUMMY {color:red;} } @media screen(max-width:9px) {#DUMMY, #DUMMY {color:red}}
Turning point at 1364 for: @media screen(min-width:9px) { #DUMMY {color:red;} } @media screen(max-width:9px) {#DUMMY {color:red;}} @media screen(max-width:9px){ #DUMMY {color:red;}}
Turning point at infinity for: @media screen (min-width:9px) { }
Turning point at infinity for: @media screen (min-width:9px) { } @media screen (min-width:9px) { } @media screen (min-width:9px) { }
Turning point at infinity for: @font-face { font-family: "blablablablabla"; } 

The last three tests show that media queries (and other at-rules such as @font-face) are not counted in the selector limit.

I have seen many "css rule" counter scripts here on Stack Oveflow (e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/a/20496041 and https://stackoverflow.com/a/12313690), but all of them are wrong, unfortunately. A media query appears as one entry in the cssRules/rules list. The right way to count the number of selectors in a stylesheet is to recursively process the style sheet to deal with (nested) @media at-rules.