alt131 - 6:02 pm on Sep 19, 2012 (gmt 0)

Hi soccrates, and welcome to css :), Good job on validating!

I suspect the same as not2easy - the pipes were placeholders in the template - although not very helpful. However I suggest take care when removing the asterisks. The "first-line" you referred to is the selector [w3.org], and asterisk is a Universal selector (scroll down the page, it is the first selector in the table)>

So [|#leftNav *|li *|a] might be a placeholder for a rule to apply the styles to
#leftNav * {}
which means everything inside an element with id="leftNav"

So just check your page after editing the css file to make sure the styles are being applied to all the elements you expected/want.