Select elements by data attribute in CSS

Question

Is it possible to select elements in CSS by their HTML5 data attributes (for example, data-role)?

Answer 1

You can combine multiple selectors and this is so cool knowing that you can select every attribute and attribute based on their value like href based on their values with CSS only..

Attributes selectors allows you play around some extra with id and class attributes

Here is an awesome read on Attribute Selectors

Fiddle

a[href="http://aamirshahzad.net"][title="Aamir"] {
  color: green;
  text-decoration: none;
}

a[id*="google"] {
  color: red;
}

a[class*="stack"] {
  color: yellow;
}

<a href="http://aamirshahzad.net" title="Aamir">Aamir</a>
<br>
<a href="http://google.com" id="google-link" title="Google">Google</a>
<br>
<a href="http://stackoverflow.com" class="stack-link" title="stack">stack</a>

Browser support:
IE6+, Chrome, Firefox & Safari

You can check detail here.

Answer 2

If you mean using an attribute selector, sure, why not:

[data-role="page"] {
    /* Styles */
}

There are a variety of attribute selectors you can use for various scenarios which are all covered in the document I link to. Note that, despite custom data attributes being a "new HTML5 feature",

• browsers typically don't have any problems supporting non-standard attributes, so you should be able to filter them with attribute selectors; and

• you don't have to worry about CSS validation either, as CSS doesn't care about non-namespaced attribute names as long as they don't break the selector syntax.

Answer 3

It's also possible to select attributes regardless of their content, in modern browsers

with:

[data-my-attribute] {
   /* Styles */
}

[anything] {
   /* Styles */
}

For example: http://codepen.io/jasonm23/pen/fADnu

Works on a very significant percentage of browsers.

Note this can also be used in a JQuery selector, or using document.querySelector

Answer 4

It's worth noting CSS3 substring attribute selectors

[attribute^=value] { /* starts with selector */
/* Styles */
}

[attribute$=value] { /* ends with selector */
/* Styles */
}

[attribute*=value] { /* contains selector */
/* Styles */
}