CSS Selectors | CSS For Beginners | Lesson 2

When it comes to website development, CSS selectors can be described as fundamental components that enable you to point out the elements that will be styled on your web pages. It is important to have knowledge of selectors if one needs to design good looking mobile friendly websites.

In this lesson, I will introduce different types of CSS selectors; the universal selector, the element selector, the ID selector, the class selector, and the group selector.

At the end of this article, you will understand how to apply these selectors to style your HTML elements with ease.

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What Are CSS Selectors?

CSS selectors are used to identify the elements that are required to be styled. These help you to select a style to your HTML elements by the tag name, class name, id or both in some cases.

Understanding the difference between each selector is important so that you can focus your time on maintaining and organizing your CSS properly.

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1. Universal Selector

The universal selector is one of the simplest and most flexible selectors that exist in CSS. It affects all aspects of a page and provides a consistent look on all the elements. The universal selector is denoted by an asterisk (*).

Example:

* {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}

In the example above, the universal selector resets margin and padding properties to ‘none” for all the html tags of the webpage. This is usually applied to remove styles and a base for further style.

When to Use:

• Resetting default styles: Universal selectors are mostly used at the beginning of the stylesheet to eliminate browser default styles.
• Applying global styles: It can also be applied for basic styling of the document, for example, setting the text size or color for the whole page.

2. Element Selector

The element selector, also called the type selector, comes with the goal of targeting HTML elements using their tag name. It is a popular selector and relatively simple.

Example:

h1 {
  color: blue;
}
p {
  font-size: 16px;
}

In this case, the element selector is used to specify color blue for all the <h1> heading tags and font size 16 for all the <p> paragraph tags.

When to Use:

• Styling specific elements: The element selector is used when you want to apply the same result on all HTML element of same kind.
• Basic styling: Usually, use it for defining the overall appearance, creating default templates for the frequently used elements, for example, headings, paragraphs, divs, etc.

3. ID Selector

This is another form of selecting an HTML element through an ID attribute that has a unique value assigned to it. Being IDs unique to each Web page, the ID selector targets a particular element on the page. It’s represented by a hash (#) followed by the ID name such as #IDname.

Example:

#header {
  background-color: lightgray;
  padding: 10px;
}

Here in the example above, the ID selector #header selects the element with the ID header and paint the background with light gray color and provide 10 pixel padding.

When to Use:

• Targeting unique elements: Apply ID selector when you have to design some particular element of a page, for instance, header, footer or main content section.
• Overriding styles: It’s also useful to override styles from other selectors as it has a high specificity level.

4. Class Selector

The class selector selects all the elements having the same class attribute. In contrast to ids, several elements can hold the similar class, that is why classes are employed with the class selector frequently. It is followed by a dot (. ) and the class name.

Example:

.container {
  max-width: 1200px;
  margin: 0 auto;
}

.button {
  background-color: royalblue;
  color: white;
  padding: 10px 20px;
}

Thus in this example the .container class defines the maximum width of the page and center alignment is used to style multiple elements. Some of the styles in button class include giving buttons a royalblue background, white text, and padding.

When to Use:

• Reusable styles: There is no doubt that the class selector is a great choice when you have more than one element such as buttons, containers or text blocks.
• Modular design: It assists in coming up with elements that can be designed uniformly, across various pages of the site.

5. Group Selector

The group selector can be used to target several elements at one time to make them take the same style. This is done where the selectors are grouped by using a comma in between the two or more selectors.

Example:

h1, h2, h3 {
  font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
  color: darkslategray;
}

In this example, the group selector is used to assign the font and color to <h1>, <h2>, abd <h3> headings to make its relatively simple to manage styles.

When to Use:

• Consistent styling: It is used when you wish to have more than one element to have the same style.
• Reducing redundancy: It makes your CSS less repetitive, making the element easy to manage.

Conclusion

CSS selectors form the core of web development, they enable you to address and transform elements as desired. This knowledge will help you create clean and efficient stylesheets that are easy to maintain and update with the help of various selectors like universal, element, ID, class, and group selectors.

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