What Are Ancestor CSS Selectors?

Dan Gold

Written by Dan

Ancestor selectors are CSS selectors that allow you to target an element based on its relationship to another ancestor element.

For example, the selector div > h1 would target any h1 element that is a child of a div element.

The advantage of using ancestor selectors is that they can be used to create more specific selector chains.

For example, the selector div > h1 > p would target any p element that is a grandchild of both a div and an h1 element. This can be useful for styling complex document structures without having to use a lot of nested classes or IDs.

Last updated

November 10th, 2022