Universal selectors
Baseline
Widely available
This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.
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
Note:
The universal selector (*) matches elements only.
It does not directly match pseudo-elements by itself.
To match all ::before pseudo-elements on a page, for example, you would have to use a selector like *::before. This works because the * matches all elements, and the ::before pseudo-element is available on all elements.
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
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| Selectors Level 4 # the-universal-selector |
Browser compatibility
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Universal selector (
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Namespaces (
*|*)
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Legend
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- Full support
- Full support