Cascade and inheritance

• Overview: Building blocks
• Next

The aim of this lesson is to develop your understanding of some of the most fundamental concepts of CSS — the cascade, specificity, and inheritance — which control how CSS is applied to HTML and how conflicts are resolved.

While working through this lesson may seem less immediately relevant and a little more academic than some other parts of the course, an understanding of these things will save you much pain later on! We encourage you to work through this section carefully and check that you understand the concepts before moving on.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, and that first word cascading is incredibly important to understand — the way that the cascade behaves is key to understanding CSS.

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. Usually, the problem is that you have created two rules which could potentially apply to the same element. The cascade, and the closely-related concept of specificity, are mechanisms that control which rule applies when there is such a conflict. Which rule is styling your element may not be the one you expect, so you need to understand how these mechanisms work.

Also significant here is the concept of inheritance, which means that some CSS properties by default inherit values set on the current element's parent element, and some don't. This can also cause some behavior that you might not expect.

Let's start by taking a quick look at the key things we are dealing with, then we'll look at each in turn and see how they interact with each other and your CSS. This can seem like a set of tricky concepts to understand. As you get more practice writing CSS, the way it works will become more obvious to you.

Stylesheets cascade — at a very simple level, this means that the order of CSS rules matters; when two rules apply that have equal specificity, the one that comes last in the CSS is the one that will be used.

In the below example, we have two rules that could apply to the h1. The h1 ends up being colored blue — these rules have an identical selector and therefore carry the same specificity, so the last one in the source order wins.

Specificity is how the browser decides which rule applies if multiple rules have different selectors, but could still apply to the same element. It is basically a measure of how specific a selector's selection will be:

• An element selector is less specific — it will select all elements of that type that appear on a page — so will get a lower score.
• A class selector is more specific — it will select only the elements on a page that have a specific class attribute value — so will get a higher score.

Example time! Below we again have two rules that could apply to the h1. The below h1 ends up being colored red — the class selector gives its rule a higher specificity, and so it will be applied even though the rule with the element selector appears further down in the source order.

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.

For example, if you set a color and font-family on an element, every element inside it will also be styled with that color and font, unless you've applied different color and font values directly to them.

Some properties do not inherit — for example, if you set a width of 50% on an element, all of its descendants do not get a width of 50% of their parent's width. If this was the case, CSS would be very frustrating to use!

These three concepts (cascade, specificity, and inheritance) together control which CSS applies to what element; in the below sections we'll see how they work together. It can sometimes seem a little bit complicated, but you will start to remember them as you get more experienced with CSS, and you can always look up the details if you forget! Even experienced developers don't remember all the details.

The below video shows how you can use the Firefox DevTools to inspect a page's cascade, specificity, and more:

We'll start with inheritance. In the example below we have a <ul>, with two levels of unordered lists nested inside it. We have given the outer <ul> a border, padding, and font color.

The color has applied to the direct children, but also the indirect children — the immediate child <li>s, and those inside the first nested list. We have then added a class- special to the second nested list and applied a different color to it. This then inherits down through its children.

Things like widths (as mentioned above), margins, padding, and borders do not inherit. If a border were to be inherited by the children of our list, every single list and list item would gain a border — probably not an effect we would ever want!

Which properties are inherited by default and which aren't is largely down to common sense.

CSS provides four special universal property values for controlling inheritance. Every CSS property accepts these values.

inherit

Sets the property value applied to a selected element to be the same as that of its parent element. Effectively, this "turns on inheritance".

initial

Sets the property value applied to a selected element to the initial value of that property.

unset

Resets the property to its natural value, which means that if the property is naturally inherited it acts like inherit, otherwise it acts like initial.

revert

Acts like unset in many cases, however will revert the property to the browser's default styling rather than the defaults applied to that property.

We can look at a list of links and explore how universal values work. The live example below allows you to play with the CSS and see what happens when you make changes. Playing with code really is the best way to get to grips with HTML and CSS.

For example:

1. The second list item has the class my-class-1 applied. This sets the color of the <a> element nested inside to inherit. If you remove the rule how does it change the color of the link?
2. Do you understand why the third and fourth links are the color that they are? The third link is set to initial, which means it uses the initial value of the property (in this case black) and not the browser default for links, which is blue. The fourth is set to unset which means that the link text uses the color of the parent element, green.
3. Which of the links will change color if you define a new color for the <a> element — for example a { color: red; }?

The CSS shorthand property all can be used to apply one of these inheritance values to (almost) all properties at once. Its value can be any one of the inheritance values (inherit, initial, unsetor revert). It's a convenient way to undo changes made to styles so that you can get back to a known starting point before beginning new changes.

In the below example we have two blockquotes. The first has styling applied to the blockquote element itself, the second has a class applied to the blockquote which sets the value of all to unset.

Try setting the value of all to some of the other available values and observe what the difference is.

We now understand why a paragraph nested deep in the structure of your HTML is the same color as the CSS applied to the body, and from the introductory lessons, we have an understanding of how to change the CSS applied to something at any point in the document — whether by assigning CSS to an element or creating a class. We will now take a proper look at how the cascade defines which CSS rules apply when more than one thing could style an element.

There are three factors to consider, listed here in increasing order of importance. Later ones overrule earlier ones:

1. Source order
2. Specificity
3. Importance

We will look at these to see how browsers figure out exactly what CSS should be applied.

We have already seen how source order matters to the cascade. If you have more than one rule, which has exactly the same weight, then the one that comes last in the CSS will win. You can think of this as rules which are nearer the element itself overwriting early ones until the last one wins and gets to style the element.

Once you understand the fact that source order matters, at some point you will run into a situation where you know that a rule comes later in the stylesheet, but an earlier, conflicting, rule is applied. This is because that earlier rule has a higher specificity — it is more specific, and therefore is being chosen by the browser as the one that should style the element.

As we saw earlier in this lesson, a class selector has more weight than an element selector, so the properties defined on the class will override those applied directly to the element.

Something to note here is that although we are thinking about selectors and the rules that are applied to the thing they select, it isn't the entire rule which is overwritten, only the properties which are the same.

This behavior helps avoid repetition in your CSS. A common practice is to define generic styles for the basic elements, and then create classes for those which are different. For example, in the stylesheet below we have defined generic styles for level 2 headings, and then created some classes which change only some of the properties and values. The values defined initially are applied to all headings, then the more specific values are applied to the headings with the classes.

Let's now have a look at how the browser will calculate specificity. We already know that an element selector has low specificity and can be overwritten by a class. Essentially a value in points is awarded to different types of selectors, and adding these up gives you the weight of that particular selector, which can then be assessed against other potential matches.

The amount of specificity a selector has is measured using four different values (or components), which can be thought of as thousands, hundreds, tens, and ones — four single digits in four columns:

1. Thousands: Score one in this column if the declaration is inside a style attribute, aka inline styles. Such declarations don't have selectors, so their specificity is always 1000.
2. Hundreds: Score one in this column for each ID selector contained inside the overall selector.
3. Tens: Score one in this column for each class selector, attribute selector, or pseudo-class contained inside the overall selector.
4. Ones: Score one in this column for each element selector or pseudo-element contained inside the overall selector.

The following table shows a few isolated examples to get you in the mood. Try going through these, and making sure you understand why they have the specificity that we have given them. We've not covered selectors in detail yet, but you can find details of each selector on the MDN selectors reference.

Before we move on, let's look at an example in action.

So what's going on here? First of all, we are only interested in the first seven rules of this example, and as you'll notice, we have included their specificity values in a comment before each one.

• The first two selectors are competing over the styling of the link's background color — the second one wins and makes the background color blue because it has an extra ID selector in the chain: its specificity is 201 vs. 101.
• The third and fourth selectors are competing over the styling of the link's text color — the second one wins and makes the text white because although it has one less element selector, the missing selector is swapped out for a class selector, which is worth ten rather than one. So the winning specificity is 113 vs. 104.
• Selectors 5–7 are competing over the styling of the link's border when hovered. Selector six clearly loses to five with a specificity of 23 vs. 24 — it has one fewer element selectors in the chain. Selector seven, however, beats both five and six — it has the same number of sub-selectors in the chain as five, but an element has been swapped out for a class selector. So the winning specificity is 33 vs. 23 and 24.

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 — !important. This is used to make a particular property and value the most specific thing, thus overriding the normal rules of the cascade.

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:

1. You'll see that the third rule's color and padding values have been applied, but the background-color hasn't. Why? Really all three should surely apply, because rules later in the source order generally override earlier rules.
2. However, the rules above it win, because class selectors have higher specificity than element selectors.
3. Both elements have a class of better, but the 2nd one has an id of winning too. Since IDs have an even higher specificity than classes (you can only have one element with each unique ID on a page, but many elements with the same class — ID selectors are very specific in what they target), the red background color and the 1px black border should both be applied to the 2nd element, with the first element getting the gray background color, and no border, as specified by the class.
4. The 2nd element does get the red background color, but no border. Why? Because of the !important declaration in the second rule — including this after border: none means that this declaration will win over the border value in the previous rule, even though the ID has higher specificity.

It is useful to know that !important exists so that you know what it is when you come across it in other people's code. However, we strongly recommend that you never use it unless you absolutely have to. !important changes the way the cascade normally works, so it can make debugging CSS problems really hard to work out, especially in a large stylesheet.

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. 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:

1. Declarations in user agent style sheets (e.g. the browser's default styles, used when no other styling is set).
2. Normal declarations in user style sheets (custom styles set by a user).
3. Normal declarations in author style sheets (these are the styles set by us, the web developers).
4. Important declarations in author style sheets
5. Important declarations in user style sheets

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 !important in their rules.

We have covered a lot in this article, but can you remember the most important information? You can find some further tests to verify that you've retained this information before you move on — see Test your skills: the Cascade.

If you understood most of this article, then well done — you've started getting familiar with the fundamental mechanics of CSS. Next up, we'll look at selectors in detail.

If you didn't fully understand the cascade, specificity, and inheritance, then don't worry! This is definitely the most complicated thing we've covered so far in the course and is something that even professional web developers sometimes find tricky. We'd advise that you return to this article a few times as you continue through the course, and keep thinking about it.

Refer back here if you start to come across strange issues with styles not applying as expected. It could be a specificity issue.

• Overview: Building blocks
• Next

1. Cascade and inheritance
2. CSS selectors
   • Type, class, and ID selectors
   • Attribute selectors
   • Pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements
   • Combinators
3. The box model
4. Backgrounds and borders
5. Handling different text directions
6. Overflowing content
7. Values and units
8. Sizing items in CSS
9. Images, media, and form elements
10. Styling tables
11. Debugging CSS
12. Organizing your CSS