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CSS Specificity: Things You Should Know
By Smashing Editorial, July 27th, 2007 in CSS | 102 Comments
Apart from Floats, the CSS Specificity is one of the most difficult concepts to grasp in Cascading Stylesheets. The different weight of selectors is usually the reason why your CSS-rules don't apply to some elements, although you think they should have. In order to minimize the time for bug hunting you need to understand, how browsers interpret your code. And to understand that, you need to have a firm understanding on how specificity works. In most cases such problems are caused by the simple fact that somewhere among your CSS-rules you've defined a more specific selector.
CSS Specificity isn't simple. However, there are methods to explain it in a simple and intuitive way. And that's what this article is all about. You'll understand the concept if you love Star Wars. Really.
Let's take a look at some important issues related to CSS Specificity as well as examples, rules, principles, common solutions and resources.
- You can find the most important things you should know about CSS specificity in a brief overview at the beginning of the article.
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CSS Float Theory: Things You Should Know
The concept of floats is probably one of the most unintuitive concepts in CSS. Floats are often misunderstood and blamed for floating all the context around it, causing readability and usability problems. However, the reason for these problems isn't the theory itself, but the way the theory is interpreted - by developers and browsers. Still, if you take a closer look at the float theory, you'll find out out that it isn't that complex as it appears to be. Most related problems are caused by the older versions of (take a guess) Internet Explorer. If you know the bugs, you can control the way information is presented in a more sophisticated, profound way.By Smashing Editorial, May 1st, 2007 in CSS | 144 Comments
Let's try to tackle the issue and clarify some usual misunderstandings, which always appear once floats are being used. We've browsed through dozens of related articles and selected the most important things you should keep in mind developing css-based layouts with floats.
Update (01.05.2007): our comment form returns some strange mistakes. We're working on it. Sorry for inconvenience.
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