What does a pipe (|) do in a CSS selector?

Question

I found the following definition in a CSS stylesheet :

*|*:link {color:#ff00ff;} 

What's the use of the |? Is it some sort of CSS Hack?

Answer 1

It separates namespace and element name.

Unless a default namespace has been defined, *|*:link is a complicated way of writing *:link or just :link.

In an XML document, you could have the following:

<el xmlns="http://name/space" /> <style> @namespace namespace_example url(http://name/space); namespace_example|el {background: red;} </style>