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Child selector

Lesson 7 of 15 in Coddy's CSS Selectors course.

A child selector is a type of CSS selector that selects all elements that are direct children of a specified element. The child selector is denoted by a greater-than sign (>) between two selectors.

Example:

Consider the following HTML structure:

<div class="parent">
   <p>This is a direct child paragraph.</p>
   <div>
       <p>This is an indirect child paragraph.</p>
   </div>
</div>

To target the direct child paragraph, you would use the child combinator as follows:

.parent > p {
    color: blue;
}

In this example, only the direct child paragraph will turn blue, not the one nested inside the inner <div>.

 

Child selectors can also be used to avoid styling elements that are not direct children of a specified element. For example, you could use a child selector to style all links that are direct children of a p element to be red.

challenge icon

Challenge

Easy

Given the following HTML structure, create a CSS rule using the child combinator to style the direct list items inside the <ul> element to have a background color of yellow.

Try it yourself

<html>
<head>
  <title>Child Selector Exercise</title>
  <style>
    /* CSS Code goes here */
  </style>
</head>
<body>
  <ul class="list">
    <li>This is a direct list item.</li>
    <div>
        <li>This is an indirect list item.</li>
    </div>
</ul>
</body>
</html>

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