CSS wildcards in attributes

Question

I ran accross this:

#id {
    width: 73.076em;
    *width: 71.25em;
}

What does the wildcard mean? I can't seem to quickly google my way out of this.

Answer 1

The * rule IS ONLY picked up by Internet Explorer.. It's a CSS hack.

*property: value applies the property value in IE 7 and below. It may or may not work in future versions. Warning: this uses invalid CSS.

Answer 2

@Phil is correct - *property: value is a CSS hack that will only be applied in IE7 and lower.

I'd like to link to this article: http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/safe-css-hacks#css-hacks

Both the _property: value and *property: value hacks (as seen in the above code block) are examples of safe CSS hacks. They were discovered, identified as bugs, and patched in a browser update. Since then, it’s very likely that Microsoft and other browser vendors added checks for these CSS hacks to their layout tests, to make sure no new browser version is shipped with a regression this significant.