Type selectors

The CSS type selector matches elements by node name. In other words, it selects all elements of the given type within a document.

/* All <a> elements. */
a {
  color: red;
}

Type selectors can be namespaced when using @namespace. This is useful when dealing with documents containing multiple namespaces such as HTML5 with inline SVG or MathML, or XML that mixes multiple vocabularies.

  • ns|h1 - matches <h1> elements in namespace ns
  • *|h1 - matches all <h1> elements
  • |h1 - matches all <h1> elements without any declared namespace

Syntax

element { style properties }

Examples

CSS

span {
  background-color: skyblue;
}

HTML

<span>Here's a span with some text.</span>
<p>Here's a p with some text.</p>
<span>Here's a span with more text.</span>

Result

Namespaces

In this example the selector will only match <h1> elements in the example namespace.

@namespace example url(http://www.example.com);
example|h1 { color: blue }

Specifications

Specification Status Comment
Selectors Level 4
The definition of 'Type (tag name) selector' in that specification.		 Working Draft No changes
Selectors Level 3
The definition of 'type selectors' in that specification.		 Recommendation No changes
CSS Level 2 (Revision 1)
The definition of 'type selectors' in that specification.		 Recommendation
CSS Level 1
The definition of 'type selectors' in that specification.		 Recommendation Initial definition

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also