What's better: "element.class" or ".class"?

HTML & CSS
1

From my understanding, “.class” is shorthand for “*.class”

Does that slow things down at all, when I’m really only targeting a certain element? (The same goes for id’s, especially. Is “#id” better, worse, or the same as “element#id”?)

I’m particularly concerned about longer selectors. One looks faster, but the other seems like it would work faster:


#id .class element .class element {
    ...
}
element#id element.class element element.class element {
    ...
}
2

Those variants affect the specificity of the selector. Unless that makes a difference to whether or not it overrides some other selector it wouldn’t make any noticeable difference and so the shorter one that allows the page to load a nanosecond or two faster would be the better option.

3

I’ve sometime noticed that w/o element name, things are not going the desired way.

and for speed performance, Never worked for large site, where it can be seen.