Css – What does the “+” (plus sign) CSS selector mean

csscss-selectors

For example:

p + p {
  /* Some declarations */
}

I don't know what the + means. What's the difference between this and just defining a style for p without + p?

Best Answer

See adjacent selectors on W3.org.

In this case, the selector means that the style applies only to paragraphs directly following another paragraph.

A plain p selector would apply the style to every paragraph in the page.

This will only work on IE7 or above. In IE6, the style will not be applied to any elements. This also goes for the > combinator, by the way.

See also Microsoft's overview for CSS compatibility in Internet Explorer.

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UPDATE January, 2017:

According to Can I use, the user-select is currently supported in all browsers except Internet Explorer 9 and its earlier versions (but sadly still needs a vendor prefix).

These are all of the available correct CSS variations:

.noselect {
  -webkit-touch-callout: none; /* iOS Safari */
    -webkit-user-select: none; /* Safari */
     -khtml-user-select: none; /* Konqueror HTML */
       -moz-user-select: none; /* Old versions of Firefox */
        -ms-user-select: none; /* Internet Explorer/Edge */
            user-select: none; /* Non-prefixed version, currently
                                  supported by Chrome, Edge, Opera and Firefox */
}

<p>
  Selectable text.
</p>
<p class="noselect">
  Unselectable text.
</p>

Note that user-select is in standardization process (currently in a W3C working draft). It is not guaranteed to work everywhere and there might be differences in implementation among browsers. Also, browsers can drop support for it in the future.

More information can be found in Mozilla Developer Network documentation.

The values of this attribute are none, text, toggle, element, elements, all and inherit.

Css – CSS parent selector

There is currently no way to select the parent of an element in CSS.

If there was a way to do it, it would be in either of the current CSS selectors specs:

That said, the Selectors Level 4 Working Draft includes a :has() pseudo-class that will provide this capability. It will be similar to the jQuery implementation.

li:has(> a.active) { /* styles to apply to the li tag */ }

However, as of 2021, this is still not supported by any browser.

In the meantime, you'll have to resort to JavaScript if you need to select a parent element.

Best Answer

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