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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 {{CSSXref("@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

{{EmbedLiveSample('Examples')}}

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

See also