What is the use of star-preceded property in CSS ?

Last Updated : 29 Jan, 2020

It is a simple hack also known as the ‘* property hack’. It is useful when it comes to dealing with the older versions of Internet Explorer (i.e. IE6 and IE7). When we add * before any property name in CSS, it targets IE 7 and below version of IE browsers and reflects when loading the same CSS on the browser while it acts as junk for all other browsers including IE 8 and above.

Note: We can use underscore (_) for IE6 and the star (*) for IE7. Add _ or * in front of a CSS property when required.

Syntax:

color: blue;    /* all browsers */
*color: blue;   /* IE7 and below */
_color: blue;   /* IE6 and below */

Below example illustrate the star-preceded property in CSS:

Example: In this example, we will see how an element preceding with a * behaves differently for different versions in IE. We can see that for element h1 we have added the property color beginning with a *.

<!DOCTYPE html> 
<html> 
<head> 
    <style> 
        p { 
            background-color: pink 
        } 
           
        h1 { 
            *color: green 
        } 
    </style> 
</head> 
   
<body> 
    <center> 
        <h1>GeeksforGeeks</h1> 
        <b> 
            A Computer Science Portal 
            for Geeks. 
        </b> 
        <p> 
          This is an example for 
          star-preceded property 
        <p> 
    </center> 
</body> 
   
</html> 

Note: It is a kind of bug and it will only works for IE7 and below.
Output:

Output For IE 7 and below: We can see that our h1 property with text GeeksforGeeks is green in color thus, *property name is excepted by this browser version.
Output For IE 8 and above: We can see that our h1 property with text GeeksforGeeks is black in color showing that *property name is treated as junk in browser IE 8 and above.