Cascade of Styles

Understanding CSS cascade, specificity, and inheritance is crucial for writing maintainable stylesheets.

The Cascade

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. The cascade determines which styles are applied when multiple rules target the same element. The cascade considers origin, importance, specificity, and order of appearance.

Specificity

Specificity is the weight assigned to a CSS selector. More specific selectors override less specific ones. The specificity hierarchy is: inline styles > IDs > classes/attributes > elements.

Inheritance

Some CSS properties are inherited from parent elements to their children. Properties like color, font-family, and line-height are inherited by default, while properties like border, padding, and margin are not.

Best Practices

To write maintainable CSS, keep specificity low, avoid inline styles, use classes over IDs for styling, and organize your stylesheets logically.