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CSS Tutorial CSS Selectors

CSS Class Selector

Lesson 8 of 182 2 min read By Deepak Paswan Updated Oct 4, 2026

A class lets you give a group of elements a name and style them together. You add the name in HTML with the class attribute, and you select it in CSS with a dot.

index.html
HTML
<style>
  .note {
    background: #fff3cd;
    border-left: 4px solid #e0a800;
    padding: 10px 14px;
  }
</style>
<p>Normal paragraph.</p>
<p class="note">This one is a note.</p>
<p>Another normal paragraph.</p>
<p class="note">And this is a second note.</p>

.note matches any element that has class="note", whatever its tag is. A class can be reused as many times as you like.

Several classes on one element

An element can carry more than one class, separated by spaces.

index.html
HTML
<style>
  .note { padding: 10px 14px; background: #eef; }
  .important { font-weight: bold; color: #b00020; }
</style>
<p class="note">A plain note.</p>
<p class="note important">A note that is also important.</p>

This lets you build small, reusable pieces and combine them, instead of writing a new rule for every case.

Limit a class to one tag

You can combine an element name and a class with no space between them. p.note only matches paragraphs with the class note.

style.css
CSS
p.note { margin-bottom: 0; }
lightbulb
Name classes by purpose
.note, .card and .button-primary still make sense after a redesign. .red-text does not once the color changes. More on this in Naming CSS Classes.
warning
Forgetting the dot
note { ... } looks for an element called <note>, which does not exist. The dot is what tells CSS “this is a class”.

Exercise: a highlight class

Create a class called highlight with a yellow background, and apply it to one word inside a paragraph using <span>.

Show a possible solution
index.html
HTML
<style>
  .highlight { background: yellow; }
</style>
<p>This is <span class="highlight">important</span> text.</p>