Why Doesn't My CSS Child Selector Work on Deeply Nested Elements?

CSS Child Selector: Why Can't I Select Descendants Directly?

In CSS, the child selector (>) denotes a direct parent-child relationship between elements. However, applying the child selector to descendants of descendants can fail. Consider the following example:

table > tr > td

This selector will correctly select the td elements, as a td element is a direct child of a tr element, and tr is a direct child of a table element. However, the following selector fails:

table > tr > td

Understanding the Missing tbody Element

HTML documents implicitly create a tbody element to contain tr elements unless explicitly defined. As such, tr is never a direct child of table, breaking the direct parent-child relationship required by the child selector.

The Solution: Adding tbody Selectors

To resolve this issue, you must add the tbody selector to bridge the gap between table and tr:

table > tbody > tr > td

Implications for XHTML Documents

XHTML documents served as application/xhtml xml do not create implicit tbody elements. Therefore, the above selector would still fail in this context. You would need to explicitly add a tbody element or use a different approach.

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