Description

This selector matches all elements that are the immediate children of a specified element. The combinator in a child selector is a greater-than sign (>). It may be surrounded by whitespace characters, but if it is, Internet Explorer 5 on Windows will incorrectly treat it as a descendant selector. So the best practice is to eschew whitespace around this combinator.

Consider this HTML fragment:

<ul>
  <li>Item 1</li>
  <li>
    <ol>
      <li>Subitem 2A</li>
      <li>Subitem 2B</li>
    </ol>
  </li>
</ul>

Let’s try to match elements in the above fragment with the selector below:

ul>li {
  ⋮ declarations
}

The child selector above will only match the two li elements that are children of the ul element. It will not match the subitems, because their parent is the ol element.

Compatibility

In Internet Explorer 7, this selector fails if a comment appears between the combinator and the simple selector that follows it.

If one of the simple selectors is missing, Internet Explorer 7 acts as if there were a universal selector in its place, instead of failing as it should.