Descendant selector code challenge is impossible. Please help!

descendant selectors is simply selecting a child of a parent. You've seen it, just the terminology getting you. So the 'p' that you want to target is the child of 'footer'.

footer p {
    color: #fff;
}

so you target with spaces, so a child <p> of a class would be

.class p {
    color:#fff;
}

so you could have a child of a child like in a list,

ul li p {
}

Which is selecting parent ul's child li, and li's child p.

Hope that helps clear up the concept. You should be able to pass your quiz now.

You can directly target the element. The challenge provides you with code setup like follows:

<footer>
    <p>All rights reserved to the state of <a href="#">California</a>.
    </p>
</footer>

the footer element contains a p element that can be targeted with a descendant selector as follows:

footer p {
}

CSS does not require a class to target, you can target html elements.

Hi!

A descendant selector always targets a child of a parent element. e.g.

<div class="parent">
<p>Hi! I'm the child of parent</p>
</div>

So if you're wanting to target the paragraph tag which is nested in a div with the class name "parent" you would do this like this.

.parent p {
/* Your Styles */
}

You could also achieve the same result doing this

<div class="parent">
<p class="child">Hi! I'm the child of parent</p>
</div>

The CSS would be:

.child {
/* Your Styles */
}

This would now target all elements in your html with the class "child". But what if you have several elements assigned the class "child" and only want to target one specific element ? That's when descendant selectors come in handy.

.parent .child {
/* Your Styles */
}

Descendant selectors don't only work targeting html tags but also classes.

On big projects style sheets can get very long with tons of classes. To avoid having to give each element a own class, descendant selectors are a great way of targeting elements in a specific parent element. It makes your stylesheet cleaner and easier to read.

Hope i didn't confuse you more.

@David, I'm referencing the Descendant Selectors video and challenge/quiz portion of "Basic Selectors" in the "Basic CSS" course.

links (first one is the video, second one is the challenge:

http://teamtreehouse.com/library/css-basics-2/basic-selectors/descendant-selectors-3

http://teamtreehouse.com/library/css-basics-2/basic-selectors/descendant-selectors-2

footer p { color: slategrey; }

Thank you David and Wil. That makes sense, and now I know how to do it in the future. I'm annoyed that we never covered that in the lessons. I'm not here to rack up points or just breeze through challenges, I actually want to learn! I use the quizzes to help me with my areas of weakness, and, it's hard going into a quiz when we are asked something we weren't taught. Very frustrating. Descendant selectors aren't easy!

footer p {}` worked, it would not let me assign anything a class. That doesn't help with terminology, unfortunately.