Universal selectors - CSS: Cascading Style Sheets | MDN (2024)

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

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also

Universal selectors - CSS: Cascading Style Sheets | MDN (2024)
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