Very basic question

[minli98]

Hi there,

In CSS, what does '>' (e.g. html>body) mean? I have seen it around, but doesn't know what it's for. Thanks.

Min

 

[tsdragon]

It is called a "child selector". Try this link to start:

http://www.dithered.com/css_filters/css_only/child_selector.html

There are links for additional info at the bottom.

FYI: I googled the string "html>body" and that was the first result of 249000.

Tracy Dryden

Meddle not in the affairs of dragons,
For you are crunchy, and good with mustard.

 

[Vragabond]

It means child, or descendant of the first order. Say you have a container div. Inside that div you have many paragraph but you also have another div and inside that div even more paragraphs. All paragraphs are descendats of the first div but only the first ones are its children. The second group of paragraphs are the children of the second div. So it helps further distinguish elements in the flow without assigning classes or ids to them. However from your example body is always the child of html, so the use of this style might be arbitrary. But this selector is completely unsupported in all UE versions, so sometimes people use it to describe specific non-IE attributes to certain elements. If you need more help on selectors, I always find this page very helpful:

http://gallery.theopalgroup.com/selectoracle/

 

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

Here's a good reference on selectors (for CSS 2):

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/selector.html

And some of the proposed CSS 3 ones:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/CR-css3-selectors-20011113/

Hope this helps,
Dan


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[minli98]

Thank you all!

Min

 

[Foamcow]

That selector is also often used as a "be nice to opera" fix when using the Box Model Hack to show different values to IE than to other browsers.

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