The CSS universal selector (*
) matches elements of any type.
css
/* 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
css
* { style properties }
The asterisk is optional with simple selectors. For instance, *.warning
and .warning
are equivalent.
Examples
CSS
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
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.
css
@namespace example url(http://www.example.com);example|* { color: blue;}
Specifications
Specification |
---|
Selectors Level 4 # the-universal-selector |
Browser compatibility
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