Learn CSS, Selectors, Part 3
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This will be the last discussion about CSS selectors in this series. In this article we will discuss the descendant, child and sibling selectors, with numerous code examples. It is the sixth article in our series covering CSS.
To understand structured CSS selectors, you need to understand how markup documents like HTML documents are structured. As you know, every HTML document begins with the element <HTML>. This is called the root element because it's the beginning of the HTML structured elements. To understand the HTML structure, let's take a look at the following HTML code:
<html>
<head>
<title>CSS Selectors</title>
</head>
<body>
<a href="Home.html">Home</a>
<p>You can use CSS with markup languages like HTML, XHTML and XML. All those markup languages and also CSS has Specifications as the <a href="http://www.w3.org">W3C website</a>
<span>The <strong>W3C</strong> is the organization of web standards </span></p>
</body>
</html>
I have indented the code so the root <HTML> element can be seen. All of the elements under the <HTML> elements are descendants from it. Any element in the document has one ultimate ancestor which is the <HTML> element, and that's why we call it the root element. It's better to discuss it in the form of a parent-child relationship: the <HTML> has two child elements in this code, the <Head> element and the <Body> element, so they are the direct children of the parent <HTML>. The <Body> element has two child elements, which are the <a> and the <p> elements. Although the <p> and <a> are child elements of <Body>, we can say that they have the same ancestor (the <Body> element). You must be familiar with this structure, because I assume that you have some experience with XHTML and XML.
Next: The Descendant Selector >>
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