Understanding the CSS Cascade and Inheritance

In this lesson, we'll look at cascade and inheritance, fundamental concepts in CSS. These concepts dictate how styles are applied when multiple rules target the same element, and how styles propagate through the DOM hierarchyHTML_DOM.

The CSS cascade

The CSS cascade is the mechanism that determines which style rules apply to an element when there are conflicting styles. It involves four main factors:

• Origin of styles: This refers to where the styles come from—browser default styles (user agent styles), user styles, or author styles.

• Specificity: The weight of the selector based on its components (IDs, classes, elements).

• Importance: The use of !important declarations to give higher priority to certain styles.

• Source order: The order in which the styles are defined in the CSS.

Let’s understand what is happening in the above CSS code:

• Line 2: Sets the color of all <p> elements to blue ...