Tag Selectors: Page-Wide Styling

Tag selectors—sometimes called type or element selectors—are extremely efficient styling tools, since they apply to every occurrence of an HTML tag on a web page. With them, you can make sweeping design changes to a page with very little effort. For example, when you want to format every paragraph of text on a page using the same font, color, and size, you merely create a style using p (as in the <p> tag) as the selector. In essence, a tag selector redefines how a browser displays a particular tag.

Prior to CSS, in order to format text, you had to wrap that text in a <font> tag. To add the same look to every paragraph on a page, you often had to use the <font> tag multiple times. This process was a lot of work and required a lot of HTML, making pages slower to download and more time-consuming to update. With tag selectors, you don't actually have to do anything to the HTML—just create the CSS rule, and let the browser do the rest.