Next up, we'll look at selectors in detail.If you didn't fully understand the cascade, specificity, and inheritance, then don't worry! It inherits its style from somewhere - if not from anything in your CSS then from something in the browser defaults. CSS Inheritance. Below we again have two rules that could apply to the We'll explain specificity scoring and other such things later on.Inheritance also needs to be understood in this context — some CSS property values set on parent elements are inherited by their child elements, and some aren't.Some properties do not inherit — for example if you set a These three concepts together control which CSS applies to what element; in the below sections we'll see how they work together. We encourage you to work through this section carefully, and check that you understand the concepts before moving on.At some point, you will be working on a project and you will find that the CSS you thought should be applied to an element is not working. Sign in to enjoy the benefits of an MDN account. But really, don't use it if you can avoid it.Finally, it is also useful to note that the importance of a CSS declaration depends on what stylesheet it is specified in — it is possible for users to set custom stylesheets to override the developer's styles, for example the user might be visually impaired, and want to set the font size on all web pages they visit to be double the normal size to allow for easier reading.Conflicting declarations will be applied in the following order, with later ones overriding earlier ones:It makes sense for web developers' stylesheets to override user stylesheets, so the design can be kept as intended, but sometimes users have good reasons to override web developer styles, as mentioned above — this can be achieved by using We have covered a lot in this article, but can you remember the most important information?

The compatibility table on this page is generated from structured data. Inheritance is always from the parent element in the document tree, even when the parent element is not the containing block.Get the latest and greatest from MDN delivered straight to your inbox.The newsletter is offered in English only at the moment. The @extend directive is useful if you have almost identically styled elements that only differ in some small details.. The attribute selector allows us to apply the base button properties to any element with a class that matches “button-“. Usually the problem is that you have created two rules which could potentially apply to the same element. When applied to an element in a document, a property with the value 'inherit' will use the same value as the parent element has for that property. At some point, you will be working on a project and you will find that the CSS you thought should be applied to an element is not working. If you have more than one rule, which has exactly the same weight, then the one that comes last in the CSS will win.

Usually the problem is that you have created two rules which could potentially apply to the same element. Every CSS property accepts these values.We can look at a list of links and explore how the universal values work. Don't think of css classes as object oriented classes, think of them as merely a tool among other selectors to specify which attribute classes an html element is styled by. A common practice is to define generic styles for the basic elements, and then create classes for those which are different. Which rule is styling your element may not be the one you expect, so you need to understand how these mechanisms work. In the example below we have a The color has applied to the direct children, but also the indirect children — the immediate child Things like widths (as mentioned above), margins, padding, and borders do not inherit. It is basically a measure of how specific a selector's selection will be:Example time! The inherit CSS keyword causes the element for which it is specified to take the computed value of the property from its parent element. Only when there is a tie between selector scores within a specificity level do you need to evaluate the next level down; otherwise, you can disregard the lower specificity level selectors since they can never overwrite the higher specificity levels.There is a special piece of CSS that you can use to overrule all of the above calculations, however you should be very careful with using it — Take a look at this example where we have two paragraphs, one of which has an ID.Let's walk through this to see what's happening — try removing some of the properties to see what happens if you are finding it hard to understand:One situation in which you may have to use it is when you are working on a CMS where you can't edit the core CSS modules, and you really want to override a style that can't be overridden in any other way.