CSS3 is a wonderful thing, but it’s easy to be bamboozled by the transforms and animations (many of which are vendor-specific) and forget about the nuts-and-bolts selectors that have also been added to the specification. A number of powerful new pseudo-selectors (16 are listed in the [latest W3C spec](https://www.w3.org/TR/css3-selectors/)) enable us to select elements based on a range of new criteria. “CSS3 Pseudo Classes”)](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/03/30/how-to-use-css3-pseudo-classes/) Before we look at these new CSS3 pseudo-classes, let’s briefly delve into the dusty past of the Web and chart the journey of these often misunderstood selectors.