There may be times when we may want to style elements that are not direct descendants of the elements that we want to style.
In [Select an Element Which Doesn't Descend From Another in CSS](https://chriskirknielsen.com/blog/select-an-element-which-doesnt-descend-from-another-in-css/) Chris Nielsen outlines a way to do this using articles and links as examples.
This is a skeleton of the content.
```html
...
```
If we want to select a `a` element that is not a direct descendant of an element with the class `.archived`, we might start with code like this:
```css
:not(.archived) > a {
background-color: hotpink;
}
```
But this will not work for any but the most basic example that have `a` elements whose parents do not have the `archived` class.
instead we can use the following selector:
```css
a:not(.archived *) {
background-color: oklch(0.65 0.27 341);
}
```
The change to the CSS represents something different: It means match all `a` elements who are not a descendant of an element with class `archived`.
