Sometimes there’s a need to reset all of the margins on a page, or you simply want something specifically applied to each element without having to count on inheritances to do the job. The solution: “*” or “universal selector”. This seems familiar from other languages right? Well, it should be. It simply means “everything” in a selected area.

The following will apply a gray background to every element on a page.

* {
    background-color: #eee;
}

What if you want to get more specific?
With this code, everything within the div with the id=”wrapper” will have a gray background.

div#wrapper * {
    background-color: #eee;
}

Obviously any properties can be used here. Enjoy.

Adding an external stylesheet to your page is preferable to using inline CSS (or just pasting it into your head code). Instead use and external file name “*.css”. To link to the file, write the code below into your head code:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="nameofYourCSSFile.css" />