Go ahead and grab a cup of coffee and prepare for some code examples.When you’re just starting with CSS, the !important tag seems like a secret weapon that you can pull out when styles aren’t working as expected.
B.J. You should avoid using them for the most… The !important declaration is a keyword that can be added at the end of any CSS property/value. He livestreams "The Weekly WP Roundup" on the Elegant Themes Facebook and YouTube channel every Friday at 3pm EST, and he hosts the Geek to Geek Podcast for funsies in his free time. Inline-styles are more specific than IDs.And that’s when we get to the !important tag. In general:The specificity scores above illustrates how each selector represents a new “level” of specificity. The !important property in CSS is used to provide more weight (importance) than normal property. is a content creator for Elegant Themes from Florence, AL. These types of uses are fine in small doses. Hopefully this guide has helped you understand how source order, inheritance, and specificity all play a role in determining how your styles work “behind the scenes.”More importantly, hopefully this guide has helped you understand how to use these rules to your advantage when writing CSS.Get articles about UX/UI Design + Front-End DevelopmentI like to share those "ah ha" moments with Designers, Developers, and UX Engineers.Get articles about UX/UI Design + Front-End Development With easy access to online learning, pretty much anyone can learn the basics of UI/UX design. The !important directive affects the way in which your CSS cascades while following the rules you feel are most crucial and should be applied. Though the option is available at our disposal, most experts consider the use of the !important declaration (or !important tag) as an anti-pattern. We’ve already discussed why you should avoid using This implies that there is kind of a “sweet spot” in the middle that you should try to stick too. Other times, it’s a hard and fast no. We can target the “text” class This increases our specificity from 0.0.0.1.0 to 0.0.0.2.0 because we are now using two classes in our selector. So try to use How to use !important? Both create their own messes in their own ways, but it shouldn’t be a problem if you work on making your classes, IDs, and pseudo-elements more specific before removing the !important tag.Well Explained about CSS, I always love to read from an elegant theme.We offer a 30 Day Money Back Guarantee, so joining is Not every web design client will have a brand color scheme and it will fall on you to pick the...As more of our lives rely on digital products, UI and UX designers are in high demand. Take a look at the screen grab below, showing some of Smashing Magazine’s styles in Chrome’s developer tools:One frustrating aspect of CSS development is when user-generated content includes inline styles, as would occur with some WYSIWYG editors in CMSs. In CSS, If you like GeeksforGeeks and would like to contribute, you can also write an article using Please Improve this article if you find anything incorrect by clicking on the "Improve Article" button below.Please write to us at contribute@geeksforgeeks.org to report any issue with the above content. So when should it be used, if ever? acknowledge that you have read and understood our However, in this particular case we want to keep our navy font color.This will only target the text inside the content div and increase our specificity value to 0.0.1.2.0.Option 2: We can introduce a “text-red” modifier class to the second
element.This will keep our specificity value to 0.0.0.2.0, but still solve our problem.Both options 1 and 2 will achieve the desired result:As you can see, when you’re styles aren’t “working like they’re supposed to” you don’t have to resort the !important tag. Only use !important on page-specific CSS that overrides foreign CSS (from external libraries, like Bootstrap or normalize.css). If you can’t override a class by adding a new ID, then how are you supposed to override it? Let’s duplicate our last
element and add an inline-style to it, setting the font color to pink.As you can see, the font color applied to the inline-styles overrides the ID selector’s font colors. He blogs about front-end code on Every week, we send out useful front-end & UX techniques. Using the !important rule in CSS is easy.
The !important tag is the only way to override an inline style.
Improved website loading is an underrated yet important benefit of CSS. When you’ve figured out a better solution, you can add it to the project and remove Inspecting an element in Firebug or Chrome’s developer tools allows you to edit styles on the fly, to test things out, debug, and so on — without affecting the real stylesheet. An !important declaration provides a way for a stylesheet author to give a CSS value more weight than it naturally has.