Rule Change: Allow no-empty-blocks to ignore comment-only blocks

[Pixel998]

What rule do you want to change?

no-empty-blocks

What change do you want to make?

Generate fewer warnings

How do you think the change should be implemented?

A new option

Example code

@media (min-width: 1200px) {
  .sidebar { /* Fix this later */ }
}

What does the rule currently do for this code?

The rule reports the block as empty.

The rule currently treats comments as not being content, so a block containing only a comment is reported. There is no option to change this behavior.

What will the rule do after it's changed?

With a new option, users could choose for comment-only blocks to be treated as non-empty, so the example above would not be reported.

Participation

• I am willing to submit a pull request to implement this change.

AI acknowledgment

• I did not use AI to generate this issue report.
• (If the above is not checked) I have reviewed the AI-generated content before submitting.

Additional comments

This would bring no-empty-blocks closer to Stylelint’s block-no-empty, which does not report comment-only blocks by default: https://stylelint.io/user-guide/rules/block-no-empty/

[DMartens]

I agree with the change to add an option for this to be consistent with the respective stylelint rule.
For clarity should blocks with only a comment be allowed or disallowed by default?

[Pixel998]

I think we should disallow comment-only blocks by default (keeping the current behavior).

[Tanujkanti4441]

Idea sounds good to me. We can name it something like allowCommentOnlyBlocks?
And how about if the rule provides a suggestion as well to add a comment inside the empty block, only if this option is enabled?

[nzakas]

For comparison, the ESLint no-empty rule has always allowed comment-only blocks by default. I'd vote for having that also be the default behavior here with an ignoreCommentOnlyBlocks option to turn that behavior off if desired.

[Tanujkanti4441]

For the purposes of this rule, comments do not count as content and this rule warns when the only content inside of a block is a comment.

I was skeptical about allowing comments by default because of this sentence in the rule docs.

But since it makes sense to me to make the rule's behavior similar no-empty core rule i think we can go with ignoreCommentOnlyBlocks option with default true and no-empty also provides the suggestion to add a comment inside blocks.

[Tanujkanti4441]

Seems there is consensus for this change, so marking as accepted.

[nzakas]

Rather than ignoreCommentOnlyBlocks, how about warnOnCommentOnlyBlocks? That way the default can be false, which I think is more natural than having the default be true. (Feel free to suggest other names, too.)