Let’s knock the obvious ones out, for the beginners, before we move onto the more advanced selectors.
The star symbol will target every single element on the page. Many developers will use this trick to zero out the margins and padding. While this is certainly fine for quick tests, I’d advise you to never use this in production code. It adds too much weight on the browser, and is unnecessary.
The * can also be used with child selectors.
#container * {
border: 1px solid black;
}
This will target every single element that is a child of the #containerdiv. Again, try not to use this technique very much, if ever.
This is a class selector. The difference between ids and classes is that, with the latter, you can target multiple elements. Use classes when you want your styling to apply to a group of elements. Alternatively, use ids to find a needle-in-a-haystack, and style only that specific element.
The next most comment selector is the descendant selector. When you need to be more specific with your selectors, you use these. For example, what if, rather than targetingall anchor tags, you only need to target the anchors which are within an unordered list? This is specifically when you’d use a descendant selector.
Pro-tip – If your selector looks like X Y Z A B.error, you’re doing it wrong. Always ask yourself if it’s absolutely necessary to apply all of that weight.
What if you want to target all elements on a page, according to their type, rather than an id or classname? Keep it simple, and use a type selector. If you need to target all unordered lists, use ul {}.
We use the :link pseudo-class to target all anchors tags which have yet to be clicked on.
Alternatively, we also have the :visited pseudo class, which, as you’d expected, allows us to apply specific styling to only the anchor tags on the page which have been clicked on, or visited.
This is referred to as an adjacent selector. It will select only the element that is immediately preceded by the former element. In this case, only the first paragraph after each ul will have red text.
The difference between the standard X Y and X > Y is that the latter will only select direct children. For example, consider the following markup.
<div id="container">
<ul>
<li> List Item
<ul>
<li> Child </li>
</ul>
</li>
<li> List Item </li>
<li> List Item </li>
<li> List Item </li>
</ul>
</div>
A selector of #container > ul will only target the uls which are direct children of thediv with an id of container. It will not target, for instance, the ul that is a child of the first li.
For this reason, there are performance benefits in using the child combinator. In fact, it’s recommended particularly when working with JavaScript-based CSS selector engines.
ul ~ p {
color: red;
}
This sibling combinator is similar to X + Y, however, it’s less strict. While an adjacent selector (ul + p) will only select the first element that is immediately preceded by the former selector, this one is more generalized. It will select, referring to our example above, any p elements, as long as they follow a ul.
Referred to as an attributes selector, in our example above, this will only select the anchor tags that have a title attribute. Anchor tags which do not will not receive this particular styling. But, what if you need to be more specific? Well…
a[href="http://net.tutsplus.com"] {
color: #1f6053; /* nettuts green */
}
The snippet above will style all anchor tags which link to http://net.tutsplus.com; they’ll receive our branded green color. All other anchor tags will remain unaffected.
Note that we’re wrapping the value in quotes. Remember to also do this when using a JavaScript CSS selector engine. When possible, always use CSS3 selectors over unofficial methods.
This works well, though, it’s a bit rigid. What if the link does indeed direct to Nettuts+, but, maybe, the path is nettuts.com rather than the full url? In those cases we can use a bit of the regular expressions syntax.
a[href*="tuts"] {
color: #1f6053; /* nettuts green */
}
There we go; that’s what we need. The star designates that the proceeding value must appear somewhere in the attribute’s value. That way, this covers nettuts.com,net.tutsplus.com, and even tutsplus.com.
Keep in mind that this is a broad statement. What if the anchor tag linked to some non-Envato site with the string tuts in the url? When you need to be more specific, use ^and &, to reference the beginning and end of a string, respectively.
Ever wonder how some websites are able to display a little icon next to the links which are external? I’m sure you’ve seen these before; they’re nice reminders that the link will direct you to an entirely different website.
This is a cinch with the carat symbol. It’s most commonly used in regular expressions to designate the beginning of a string. If we want to target all anchor tags that have a hrefwhich begins with http, we could use a selector similar to the snippet shown above.
Notice that we’re not searching for http://; that’s unnecessary, and doesn’t account for the urls that begin with https://.
Now, what if we wanted to instead style all anchors which link to, say, a photo? In those cases, let’s search for the end of the string.
Again, we use a regular expressions symbol, $, to refer to the end of a string. In this case, we’re searching for all anchors which link to an image — or at least a url that ends with .jpg. Keep in mind that this certainly won’t work for gifs and pngs.
Refer back to number eight; how do we compensate for all of the various image types:png, jpeg,jpg, gif? Well, we could create multiple selectors, such as:
But, that’s a pain in the butt, and is inefficient. Another possible solution is to use custom attributes. What if we added our own data-filetype attribute to each anchor that links to an image?
<a href="path/to/image.jpg" data-filetype="image"> Image Link </a>
Then, with that hook in place, we can use a standard attributes selector to target only those anchors.
Here’s a special one that’ll impress your friends. Not too many people know about this trick. The tilda (~) symbol allows us to target an attribute which has a spaced-separated list of values.
Going along with our custom attribute from number fifteen, above, we could create adata-info attribute, which can receive a space-separated list of anything we need to make note of. In this case, we’ll make note of external links and links to images — just for the example.
With that markup in place, now we can target any tags that have either of those values, by using the ~ attributes selector trick.
* Target data-info attr that contains the value "external" */
a[data-info~="external"] {
color: red;
}
/* And which contain the value "image" */
a[data-info~="image"] {
border: 1px solid black;
}
The before and after pseudo classes kick butt. Every day, it seems, people are finding new and creative ways to use them effectively. They simply generate content around the selected element.
Many were first introduced to these classes when they encountered the clear-fix hack.
This hack uses the :after pseudo class to append a space after the element, and then clear it. It’s an excellent trick to have in your tool bag, particularly in the cases when theoverflow: hidden; method isn’t possible.
For another creative use of this, refer to my quick tip on creating shadows.
According to the CSS3 Selectors specification, you should technically use the pseudo element syntax of two colons ::. However, to remain compatible, the user-agent will accept a single colon usage as well. In fact, at this point, it’s smarter to use the single-colon version in your projects.
Compatibility
IE8+
Firefox
Chrome
Safari
Opera
19. X:hover
div:hover {
background: #e3e3e3;
}
Oh come on. You know this one. The official term for this is user action pseudo class. It sounds confusing, but it really isn’t. Want to apply specific styling when a user hovers over an element? This will get the job done!
Keep in mind that older version of Internet Explorer don’t respond when the :hover pseudo class is applied to anything other than an anchor tag.
You’ll most often use this selector when applying, for example, a border-bottom to anchor tags, when hovered over.
IE6+ (In IE6, :hover must be applied to an anchor element)
Firefox
Chrome
Safari
Opera
20. X:not(selector)
div:not(#container) {
color: blue;
}
The negation pseudo class is particularly helpful. Let’s say I want to select all divs, except for the one which has an id of container. The snippet above will handle that task perfectly.
Or, if I wanted to select every single element (not advised) except for paragraph tags, we could do:
We can use pseudo elements (designated by ::) to style fragments of an element, such as the first line, or the first letter. Keep in mind that these must be applied to block level elements in order to take effect.
This snippet is an abstraction that will find all paragraphs on the page, and then sub-target only the first letter of that element.
This is most often used to create newspaper-like styling for the first-letter of an article.
Similarly, the ::first-line pseudo element will, as expected, style the first line of the element only.
“For compatibility with existing style sheets, user agents must also accept the previous one-colon notation for pseudo-elements introduced in CSS levels 1 and 2 (namely, :first-line, :first-letter, :before and :after). This compatibility is not allowed for the new pseudo-elements introduced in this specification.” – Source
Remember the days when we had no way to target specific elements in a stack? Thenth-child pseudo class solves that!
Please note that nth-child accepts an integer as a parameter, however, this is not zero-based. If you wish to target the second list item, use li:nth-child(2).
We can even use this to select a variable set of children. For example, we could doli:nth-child(4n) to select every fourth list item.
What if you had a huge list of items in a ul, and only needed to access, say, the third to the last item? Rather than doing li:nth-child(397), you could instead use the nth-last-child pseudo class.
This technique works almost identically from number sixteen above, however, the difference is that it begins at the end of the collection, and works its way back.
There will be times when, rather than selecting a child, you instead need to select according to the type of element.
Imagine mark-up that contains five unordered lists. If you wanted to style only the thirdul, and didn’t have a unique id to hook into, you could use the nth-of-type(n) pseudo class. In the snippet above, only the third ul will have a border around it.
And yes, to remain consistent, we can also use nth-last-of-type to begin at the end of the selectors list, and work our way back to target the desired element.
Compatibility
IE9+
Firefox 3.5+
Chrome
Safari
Opera
26. X:first-child
ul li:first-child {
border-top: none;
}
This structural pseudo class allows us to target only the first child of the element’s parent. You’ll often use this to remove borders from the first and last list items.
For example, let’s say you have a list of rows, and each one has a border-top and aborder-bottom. Well, with that arrangement, the first and last item in that set will look a bit odd.
Many designers apply classes of first and last to compensate for this. Instead, you can use these pseudo classes.
