Reputation: 11277

Overriding a class in CSS

There are already many questions related to this. But I'm still not clear. Also not sure if the title of the question is correct. Here's my problem:

What the below CSS code means?

#nav li { /*some cssA*/ }
#nav li.over { /*some cssB*/ }
#nav li a { /*some cssC*/ }
#nav li a:hover { /*some cssD*/ }
#nav li ul a span { /*some cssE*/ }

As per my understanding, please correct me if I am wrong:

Line 1: every li element within any element with id="nav" will have styling cssA

Line 2: When I put my cursor over every li element within any element with id="nav" will have styling cssB

Line 3: every a element within every li element within any element with id="nav" will have styling cssC

Line 4: When I hover every a element within every li element within any element with id="nav" will have styling cssD

Line 5: Every span element within every a element within every ul element within every li element within any element with id="nav" will have styling cssE. Also anyother ul or a element will not have this style untill unless the parent element has id="nav"

Upvotes: 2

Answers (3)

pwdst

Reputation: 13775

All of the existing answers are correct, but there is a bit more to it than has been given already.

As has already been said, "li.over" is a combined selector - it will selector li elements that also have a class of "over". If you wanted to use different CSS properties or property values whilst the mouse is over (hovering over) the element then you use the pseudo class selector "li:hover". These are called pseudo class as you aren't selecting something that is part of the document, but based on the state of an element. There are also pseudo elements which again aren't in the document directly, but logical extensions of the document structure - for example first-child, first-of-type, fifth-of-type, odd items etc.

"#nav li ul a span" is a descendant selector, as you say it will select elements that are children (at any level) of each parent, so "#nav li" selects "li" elements contained within an item with ID "nav" - even several levels down.

If you want to select items that are direct children of the parent then you can use the ">" symbol. I.e. "#nav > li" will select li elements that are directly below any item with an ID of "nav", but not any li elements that are children of that element, or indeed elements below that.

Incidentally "#nav" is exactly equivalent to "*#nav" as it selects any element with the ID, you could also write "ul#nav" if you only wanted to select ul elements with the ID. This could in turn be combined with a class "ul#nav.bar" or even multiple classes "ul#nav.bar.touch".

Removing the space between the selectors like this combines them, so in the last case instead of looking for an item with class "touch" inside an item with class "bar" inside an item with ID "nav" inside a "ul" element, you are selecting a "ul" element with an ID of "nav" and both the classes "bar" and touch". An element like this-

<ul class="bar touch" id="nav">...</ul>

It is also possible to use attribute selectors, so if you wanted to select links which will open in a new window you could use "a[target=_blank]" - which selects based both on the presence of the attribute and the value - or if you wanted to select links with any href value you could use "a[href]". This simply selects all elements with this attribute.

On top of that you can even select items which are adjacent (next to) another element, if you wanted to select all paragraphs directly following an image then you would use "img + p" in your selector, or "p + img" if you wanted to select images directly following a paragraph. As always the last item in the selector is the one the styles are applied to.

It is generally considered good practice not to be overly specific with CSS selectors, as it makes your code much less re-usable. Unless you need to write "div.widget" just write ".widget" as the otherwise you'd not be able to create a "widget" using other elements, and it makes it much harder to override these properties later on in those cases you might need to.

To wrap up selectors, there's a good introduction to CSS selectors on MDN and Code School (paid course provider) also have a excellent online foundation course on CSS available for a very reasonable price which will go through selectors in some detail.

With regard to overriding classes, there are two further concepts you should understand - cascade order and specificity.

Given a HTML snippet of-

<div class="widget">
  <p>
    Some text you want to style
  </p>
</div>

And the following CSS-

#widget p { color: yellow; }
p { color: blue; }

The color of the text would be yellow and not blue because the specificity of the first selector is greater (more specific) than the second. To understand this I suggest you have a play with a Specificity calculator and have a read of the Smashing Magazine tutorial on the subject.

In short though, inline styles trump all, and the more specific a selector the more likely it is to be applied in place of other selectors that would otherwise apply different property values. The value in the selector with the highest specificity score "wins", but other property values from selectors with lower specificity that do not clash will also still be applied to the element.

For example, altering our earlier CSS-

#widget p { color: yellow; }
p { 
     color: blue;
     font-weight: bold;
  }

The text will still be yellow, but will also be bold as there is no font-weight property given in the selector with higher specificity.

The last concept you should understand is what happens when two or more rules have identical specificity.

#widget p { color: yellow; }
#widget p { 
     color: blue;
     font-weight: bold;
  }

In this case our text is now blue as the second rule appears later in the stylesheet and thus overrides the first. If you have multiple stylesheets then the rules from the last stylesheet to appear in the document head will override rules with identical specificity.

In almost all cases you should use a more specific or the order of the selectors within the stylesheet in order to apply the right styles to the right element, and absolutely should not be routinely using the !important flag to achieve this unless absolutely necessary. See http://james.padolsey.com/usability/dont-use-important/ for a fuller explanation than I give here, but it rapidly becomes unmaintainable (what do you do when everything is "important") and it is also not accessible for users who may wish to override your styles in their user agent stylesheet (local to their browser) in order to help them read or use the page (increasing font size, contrast with background colour etc.)

Upvotes: 0