How to select an element without selecting its child elements

Sometimes in CSS, you may need to select specific elements, but don't let the child elements with the same name be selected. This can sometimes be difficult, as you want a distinct style for the parent element without it affecting its default child. To achieve this, we can use several different methods, which I will explain further.

One of the best methods for solving this issue is to use CSS selectors such as the descendant and direct-child selectors. These selectors can precisely specify which elements should be styled and which should not be inherited.

Sometimes using specific classes for elements that shouldn't be selected can help. This action can make managing elements better, and their style can relate to their placement.

Understanding the structure of HTML and the CSS selectors can help you to easily manage this issue. By using CSS principles, you can define your specific styles for specific types of elements while still allowing other elements to use general styles.

In the following concise example of using this technique, we will see that it's always better to apply this concept in practice and using practical code.

Code Example

<style>
  .parent > .child {
    color: blue;
  }
</style>

<div class="parent">
  Text outside the specific descendant
  <div class="child">Text directly descendant</div>
  <div>
    <div class="child">Text nested</div>
  </div>
</div>

Code Explanation

<style>
The <style> tag is used for defining internal CSS.

.parent > .child
This selector only selects the direct descendant element with the class .parent that also has the class .child.

color: blue;
This sets the text color for the primary child class to blue.

The result will be that the only element with the class .child which is directly nested in .parent will have blue text.