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.

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

Report problems with this compatibility data on GitHub
desktopmobile
Chrome
Edge
Firefox
Opera
Safari
Chrome Android
Firefox for Android
Opera Android
Safari on iOS
Samsung Internet
WebView Android
WebView on iOS
Universal selector (*)
Namespaces (*|*)

Legend

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Full support
Full support

See also