CSS Selectors in HTML Tutorials Examples

In CSS, selectors target the HTML elements on our web pages that we want to style. There are a wide variety of CSS selectors available, allowing for fine-grained precision when selecting elements to style

There are several different types of selectors in CSS.

CSS Element Selector
CSS Id Selector
CSS Class Selector
CSS Universal Selector
CSS Group Selector

The CSS element Selector

The element selector selects HTML elements based on the element name.

Example

Here, all elements on the page will be center-aligned, with a red text color:

p {
text-align: center;
color: red;
}

The CSS id Selector

The id selector uses the id attribute of an HTML element to select a specific element.

The id of an element is unique within a page, so the id selector is used to select one unique element!

To select an element with a specific id, write a hash (#) character, followed by the id of the element.

Example

The CSS rule below will be applied to the HTML element with id="para1":

#para1 {
text-align: center;
color: red;
}

The CSS class Selector

The class selector selects HTML elements with a specific class attribute.

To select elements with a specific class, write a period (.) character, followed by the class name.

Example

In this example all HTML elements with class="center" will be red and center-aligned:

.center {
text-align: center;
color: red;
}

Example

In this example only elements with class="center" will be red and center-aligned:

p.center {
text-align: center;
color: red;
}

Example

In this example the element will be styled according to class="center" and to class="large":

This paragraph refers to two classes.

The CSS Universal Selector

The universal selector (*) selects all HTML elements on the page.

Example

The CSS rule below will affect every HTML element on the page:

* {
text-align: center;
color: blue;
}

The CSS Grouping Selector

The grouping selector selects all the HTML elements with the same style definitions.

Look at the following CSS code (the h1, h2, and p elements have the same style definitions):

h1 {
text-align: center;
color: red;
}

h2 {
text-align: center;
color: red;
}

p {
text-align: center;
color: red;
}

Another CSS selector Example

In this example we have grouped the selectors from the code above:

h1, h2, p {
text-align: center;
color: red;
}

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CSS Selectors in HTML Tutorials Examples