Learn CSS Flexbox by Building a Photo Gallery - Step 7

HTML-CSS
1

I just want to know what the * selector is doing. I looked up what the box-sizing is and have loose idea of what that is doing, but I don’t get why I needed to use *. That doesn’t seem to be referencing anything in the code. I’ve finished this lesson and nowhere do I ever even use another *. Is it a sort of select all selector. Like, does using a * mean that the following code is applied to everything? Why not set the selector to img, div, or body?

Your code so far

<!-- file: index.html -->
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>Photo Gallery</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="./styles.css">
  </head>
  <body>
    <header class="header">
      <h1>css flexbox photo gallery</h1>
    </header>
    <div class="gallery">
      <img src="https://cdn.freecodecamp.org/curriculum/css-photo-gallery/1.jpg">
      <img src="https://cdn.freecodecamp.org/curriculum/css-photo-gallery/2.jpg">
      <img src="https://cdn.freecodecamp.org/curriculum/css-photo-gallery/3.jpg">
      <img src="https://cdn.freecodecamp.org/curriculum/css-photo-gallery/4.jpg">
      <img src="https://cdn.freecodecamp.org/curriculum/css-photo-gallery/5.jpg">
      <img src="https://cdn.freecodecamp.org/curriculum/css-photo-gallery/6.jpg">
      <img src="https://cdn.freecodecamp.org/curriculum/css-photo-gallery/7.jpg">
      <img src="https://cdn.freecodecamp.org/curriculum/css-photo-gallery/8.jpg">
      <img src="https://cdn.freecodecamp.org/curriculum/css-photo-gallery/9.jpg">
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

/* file: styles.css */
* {
  box-sizing: border-box;
}

Your browser information:

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/104.0.5112.126 Safari/537.36

Challenge: Learn CSS Flexbox by Building a Photo Gallery - Step 7

Link to the challenge:

2

It is applying the property to every element. It’s the “select all elements” selector.

Because box-sizing set to border-box is so convenient and what you probably want for everything that you just set it to everything :slight_smile:

2 Likes
3

yes * is the selector of all elements (select all elements)

You could call out all the different elements individually to give them the box-sizing but * here is a catch-all

box-sizing btw just says that when figuring out how large an element is, the browser should include any padding or border into the calculation (when normally it wouldn’t)

1 Like
4

Thank you, that makes sense. I was just confused because I thought it should have been set to body to get everything in this particular code. However, that does seem very useful to be able to select everything at once.

5

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