Stop Struggling with CSS: Master Inheritance, Specificity & Cascade Now

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Shefali

CSS can be frustrating, especially when your styles don’t show up the way you expect. You write the code, but colors, fonts, or layouts look off, and you’re left scratching your head. What went wrong?

Most of the time, it’s because inheritance, specificity, and the cascade aren’t clear. Once you get these basics down, you’ll write cleaner, more predictable CSS and finally stop struggling with styling.

In this post, you’ll learn how inheritance, specificity, and the cascade work together to decide which styles actually get applied, with easy examples and tips you can start using today.

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Now, let’s jump right into it!

CSS Inheritance: What Gets Passed Down?

Inheritance means some CSS properties pass down from parent elements to their child elements.

Mostly, this happens with text styles like color, font-family, font-size, and line-height, etc.

Example:

body {
  color: blue;
}
p {
  /* p will be blue because it inherits from body */
}

Note: Not all CSS properties inherit. If you want to force inheritance for a property, then you can use:

p {
  background: inherit;
}

Why it matters

Inheritance helps you write less code by applying styles to parent elements and letting children automatically follow. It keeps CSS clean and DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself).

CSS Specificity: Who Wins When Styles Clash?

When multiple CSS rules target the same element, specificity decides which one actually applies.

Specificity Levels:

Selector Type	Power	Example
Inline Styles		<div style="color:red">
ID Selectors		#header {}
Class / Attributes / Pseudo-classes		.box {}, a:hover {}
Element Tags / Pseudo-elements		p {}, ::before {}

Example:

If you write:

<h1 id="title" class="title">Hello</h1>

#title {
  color: red; /* strong */
}
.title {
  color: green; /* medium */
}
h1 {
  color: blue; /* weak */
}

The text will be red because the ID selector wins.

Important tips:

• If two selectors are equal → last one wins.

Example:

.title {
    color: red;
  }
  .title {
    color: green;
  }

The color will be green.

• !important will always win.

Example:

.title {
  color: red !important;
}
.title {
  color: green;
}

The color will be red.

Why it matters

Without understanding specificity, your CSS can behave unpredictably, and you’ll wonder why your styles don’t apply as expected.

CSS Cascade: The Final Decision Maker

The Cascade decides the final CSS by checking:

• Important rules (!important first)
• Source type (browser defaults, user styles, your CSS)
• Specificity (strongest selector wins)
• Order in code (last rule wins if there’s a tie)

Example:

p {
  color: green; /* normal */
}
p {
  color: red !important; /* important */
}

The color will be red because !important takes priority.

Why it matters

The cascade is what makes CSS stand for “Cascading Style Sheets”. It decides which rule actually gets applied when there are conflicts. Without it, browsers wouldn’t know which style to show.

Quick Summary

That’s all for today!

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This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Shefali