HTML5: Your visual blueprint™ for designing rich web pages and applications

SELECT HTML ELEMENTS USING A NEGATING PSEUDO-CLASS

You can use the new negating pseudo-class selector to match all elements that do not match the supplied argument. Effectively, you are changing “select everything that matches element” into “select everything except this matching element.”

To limit the scope of what you want to stylize, append :not(selector) after an initial selector:

selector1:not(selector2) { ... }

Simply put, this will select all elements that match selector1 but do not match selector2.

Actually, the preceding synopsis is overly simplified. You can combine any of the CSS selector types on either side of :not, such as the class, ID, or attribute selectors, to further restrict matching elements.

Be careful about specifying ...