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Universal selectors

The CSS universal selector (*) matches elements of any type.

/* Selects all elements */
* {
  color: green;
}

The universal selector is a special type selector and can therefore be namespaced when using @namespace. This is useful when dealing with documents containing multiple namespaces such as HTML with inline SVG or MathML, or XML that mixes multiple vocabularies.

  • ns|* - matches all elements in namespace ns
  • *|* - matches all elements
  • |* - matches all elements without any declared namespace

Syntax

* { style properties }

The asterisk is optional with simple selectors. For instance, *.warning and .warning are equivalent.

Examples

CSS

* [lang^="en"] {
  color: green;
}

*.warning {
  color: red;
}

*#maincontent {
  border: 1px solid blue;
}

.floating {
  float: left;
}

/* automatically clear the next sibling after a floating element */
.floating + * {
  clear: left;
}

HTML

<p class="warning">
  <span lang="en-us">A green span</span> in a red paragraph.
</p>
<p id="maincontent" lang="en-gb">
  <span class="warning">A red span</span> in a green paragraph.
</p>

Result

Namespaces

In this example the selector will only match elements in the example namespace.

@namespace example url(http://www.example.com);
example|* {
  color: blue;
}

Specifications

Browser compatibility

Desktop Mobile
Chrome Edge Firefox Internet Explorer Opera Safari WebView Android Chrome Android Firefox for Android Opera Android Safari on IOS Samsung Internet
Universal_selectors 1 12 1 7 3.5 1 ≤37 18 4 10.1 1 1.0
namespaces 1 12 1 9 8 1.3 ≤37 18 4 10.1 1 1.0

See also

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Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License v2.5 or later.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Universal_selectors