Pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements

A pseudo-class is a selector that selects elements that are in a specific state, e.g. they are the first element of their type, or they are being hovered over by the mouse pointer. They tend to act as if you had applied a class to some part of your document, often helping you cut down on excess classes in your markup, and giving you more flexible, maintainable code.

Pseudo-classes are keywords that start with a colon. For example, :hover is a pseudo-class.

Let's look at a simple example. If we wanted to make the first paragraph in an article larger and bold, we could add a class to that paragraph and then add CSS to that class, as shown in the first example below:

<article>
  <p class="first">
    Veggies es bonus vobis, proinde vos postulo essum magis kohlrabi welsh onion
    daikon amaranth tatsoi tomatillo melon azuki bean garlic.
  </p>

  <p>
    Gumbo beet greens corn soko endive gumbo gourd. Parsley shallot courgette
    tatsoi pea sprouts fava bean collard greens dandelion okra wakame tomato.
    Dandelion cucumber earthnut pea peanut soko zucchini.
  </p>
</article>

.first {
  font-size: 120%;
  font-weight: bold;
}

However, this could be annoying to maintain — what if a new paragraph got added to the top of the document? We'd need to move the class over to the new paragraph. Instead of adding the class, we could use the :first-child pseudo-class selector — this will always target the first child element in the article, and we will no longer need to edit the HTML (this may not always be possible anyway, maybe due to it being generated by a CMS).

<article>
  <p>
    Veggies es bonus vobis, proinde vos postulo essum magis kohlrabi welsh onion
    daikon amaranth tatsoi tomatillo melon azuki bean garlic.
  </p>

  <p>
    Gumbo beet greens corn soko endive gumbo gourd. Parsley shallot courgette
    tatsoi pea sprouts fava bean collard greens dandelion okra wakame tomato.
    Dandelion cucumber earthnut pea peanut soko zucchini.
  </p>
</article>

article p:first-child {
  font-size: 120%;
  font-weight: bold;
}

All pseudo-classes behave in this same kind of way. They target some bit of your document that is in a certain state, behaving as if you had added a class into your HTML. Take a look at some other examples on MDN:

• :last-child
• :only-child
• :invalid

Some pseudo-classes only apply when the user interacts with the document in some way. These user-action pseudo-classes, sometimes referred to as dynamic pseudo-classes, act as if a class had been added to the element when the user interacts with it. Examples include:

• :hover — mentioned above; this only applies if the user moves their pointer over an element, typically a link.
• :focus — only applies if the user focuses the element by clicking or using keyboard controls.

<p><a href="">Hover over me</a></p>

a:link,
a:visited {
  color: rebeccapurple;
  font-weight: bold;
}

a:hover {
  color: hotpink;
}

Pseudo-elements behave in a similar way. However, they act as if you had added a whole new HTML element into the markup, rather than applying a class to existing elements.

Pseudo-elements start with a double colon ::. ::before is an example of a pseudo-element.

For example, if you wanted to select the first line of a paragraph you could wrap it in a <span> element and use an element selector; however, that would fail if the number of words you had wrapped were longer or shorter than the parent element's width. As we tend not to know how many words will fit on a line — as that will change if the screen width or font-size changes — it is impossible to robustly do this by adding HTML.

The ::first-line pseudo-element selector will do this for you reliably — if the number of words increases or decreases it will still only select the first line.

<article>
  <p>
    Veggies es bonus vobis, proinde vos postulo essum magis kohlrabi welsh onion
    daikon amaranth tatsoi tomatillo melon azuki bean garlic.
  </p>

  <p>
    Gumbo beet greens corn soko endive gumbo gourd. Parsley shallot courgette
    tatsoi pea sprouts fava bean collard greens dandelion okra wakame tomato.
    Dandelion cucumber earthnut pea peanut soko zucchini.
  </p>
</article>

article p::first-line {
  font-size: 120%;
  font-weight: bold;
}

It acts as if a <span> was magically wrapped around that first formatted line, and updated each time the line length changed.

You can see that this selects the first line of both paragraphs.

If you wanted to make the first line of the first paragraph bold you could chain the :first-child and ::first-line selectors together. Try editing the previous live example so it uses the following CSS. We are saying that we want to select the first line, of the first <p> element, which is inside an <article> element.

article p:first-child::first-line {
  font-size: 120%;
  font-weight: bold;
}

There are a couple of special pseudo-elements, which are used along with the content property to insert content into your document using CSS.

You could use these to insert a string of text, such as in the live example below. Try changing the text value of the content property and see it change in the output. You could also change the ::before pseudo-element to ::after and see the text inserted at the end of the element instead of the beginning.

<p class="box">Content in the box in my HTML page.</p>

.box::before {
  content: "This should show before the other content. ";
}

Inserting strings of text from CSS isn't really something we do very often on the web however, as that text is inaccessible to some screen readers and might be hard for someone to find and edit in the future.

A more valid use of these pseudo-elements is to insert an icon, for example the little arrow added in the example below, which is a visual indicator that we wouldn't want read out by a screen reader:

<p class="box">Content in the box in my HTML page.</p>

.box::after {
  content: " ➥";
}

These pseudo-elements are also frequently used to insert an empty string, which can then be styled just like any element on the page.

In this next example, we have added an empty string using the ::before pseudo-element. We have set this to display: block in order that we can style it with a width and height. We then use CSS to style it just like any element. You can play around with the CSS and change how it looks and behaves.

<p class="box">Content in the box in my HTML page.</p>

.box::before {
  content: "";
  display: block;
  width: 100px;
  height: 100px;
  background-color: rebeccapurple;
  border: 1px solid black;
}

The use of the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements along with the content property is referred to as "Generated Content" in CSS, and you will often see this technique being used for various tasks. A great example is the site CSS Arrow Please, which helps you to generate an arrow with CSS. Look at the CSS as you create your arrow and you will see the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements in use. Whenever you see these selectors, look at the content property to see what is being added to the HTML element.

In this article we've introduced CSS pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements, which are special types of selectors.

Pseudo-classes enable you to target an element when it's in a particular state, as if you had added a class for that state to the DOM. Pseudo-elements act as if you had added a whole new element to the DOM, and enable you to style that. The ::before and ::after pseudo-elements enable you to insert content into the document using CSS.

In the next article, we'll learn about combinators.

• Pseudo-classes reference
• Pseudo-elements reference

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