What does the "+" (plus sign) CSS selector mean?

css css-selectors
gday picture gday · Jul 16, 2009 · Viewed 323.7k times · Source

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?

Answer

Thorarin picture Thorarin · Jul 16, 2009

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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