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>
Namespaces
In this example the selector will only match elements in the example namespace.
@namespace example url(http://www.example.com); example|* { color: blue; }