How to write a CSS rule that will affect every element:

jamis — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:28:52 +0000

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.

Add an external CSS Stylesheet to your page

jamis — Thu, 17 May 2007 00:00:25 +0000

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:

Thoughts on Design » CSS

How to write a CSS rule that will affect every element:

Add an external CSS Stylesheet to your page