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

css
/* 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 HTML 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

css
element { style properties }

Examples

CSS

css
span {
  background-color: skyblue;
}

HTML

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.

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

Specifications

Specification
Selectors Level 4
# type-selectors

Browser compatibility

See also