Overriding Important CSS

In the dynamic world of web development, CSS plays an essential role in styling and designing an appealing webpage. Occasionally, you might encounter a need to override important CSS to fine-tune your pages. This article offers a simple tutorial on how to achieve this seamlessly.

Code Snippet

To override important CSS, we can leverage the specificity of CSS selectors. Let’s consider an example where you want to override a style that has been marked as important.

body {
    background-color: blue !important;
}

body {
    background-color: green;
}

In this example, despite the latter declaration, the background color of the body will still be blue due to the !important rule.

To override it, we can make the selector more specific:

html body {
    background-color: green !important;
}

Now, the background color will be green as we have more specificity on the selector along with an !important rule.

Code Explanation

In the first instance, the body’s background color remains blue because, with the !important declaration, the browser gives it more weight than any subsequent related CSS rule. !important tells the browser to consider this rule supreme for the targeted element irrespective of any other rule.

The trick to override an important declaration is to increase the specificity of the CSS selector. Each HTML tag, class, id, or attribute you target with your CSS increases the specificity of that rule.

In the overriding code, ‘html body’ is more specific than just ‘body’. Hence, the rule targeting ‘html body’ carries more weight, overriding the previous important rule.

However, this practice should only be exercised when absolutely necessary, as it can make your CSS less predictable and harder to maintain. It’s a much better habit to organize your CSS in ways to avoid needing to override !important rules.