The “C” in CSS — the “cascading” part — describes the way our styles can flow down from the high-level architecture in our documents, down to the smaller page elements. It hints at the normal direction that styles flow — downwards — but this isn’t the ONLY way styles can be routed to one page object via another.
Sibling selectors is one method that I find is often overlooked. Personally I’ve known vaguely what they did for years, but never fully understood the mechanics until quite recently. Frankly, they’re a little weird, so using them often requires a bit of a rethink.
With some help from the Bradys, some CSS and touch of virtual electricity, I’ve pulled together a couple of examples showing how siblings selectors work.
So, if you never *quite* got your head around how the tilde (~) and plus (+) signs work in CSS, here’s the perfect four-minute dash to get you on track.
Again, we’re using Lea’s awesome Dabblet for the examples, and you can play along here:
- Adjacent Sibling Selector: https://bit.ly/AdjSib
- General Sibling Selector: https://bit.ly/GenSib
Enjoy!
Alex WalkerAlex has been doing cruel and unusual things to CSS since 2001. He is the lead front-end design and dev for SitePoint and one-time SitePoint's Design and UX editor with over 150+ newsletter written. Co-author of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. Now Alex is involved in the planning, development, production, and marketing of a huge range of printed and online products and references. He has designed over 60+ of SitePoint's book covers.
