Did you read the parent bug, Rick? I put it here in the shared directory at Andrew's suggestion because it is required to make the shared CSS work as intended.  

I believe that the very specific selector above guarantees that previousElementSibling.value will always work on this line.  What did you have in mind in suggesting breaking it down into smaller units?  

What I want here is a single function that an app can call to make the CSS markup in shared/style/input_areas.css work the way they want.  Out of context, I agree that this is a bizarre function. But it exists to fix up some bizarre CSS.  We need it urgently for the email app, but apparently there are a bunch of other apps using input_areas.css and also getting non-functional X buttons in their input fields.