Stop using '!important' in css - css specificity explained in shortest possible way

Debjit Sinha — Sat, 26 Jun 2021 11:38:20 +0000

Most of the time I have seen developers using !important in css without any necessity. Using !important just for a simple override is always a bad practice. This is because it makes debugging more difficult by breaking the natural cascading in your stylesheets.

You might be asking, "then how do I avoid it"?
Answer is, you can do it using greater "specificity".

For the next few minutes I am going to explain CSS specificity in the shortest way possible.

CSS specificity is the value provided to each selector so that the browser can understand how much priority to be given to a specific selector.
Below are the selector types in decreasing priority order. The top one having the highest priority and the bottom one has the lowest.

!important - this one is given the highest priority, overriding everything else, including inline styles (style attribute). If there are multiple CSS selectors with !important mentioned for same element, the last declaration found in the CSS is applied to the element.

h1 {
  color: blue !important
}

Inline styles

<h1 style="color: red">Hello reader</h1>

ID Selector

#headline {
  color: green
}

Class, pseudo class and attribute selector

// class selector
.headline {
  color: red
}

// pseudo class selector
h1:hover {
  color: red
}

// attribute selector
[type="input"] {
  color: red
}

Type Selectors and pseudo elements

// type selector
h1 {
  color: red
}

// pseudo element selector
h1:before {
  color: red
}

Other than the above type of selectors there are Universal selectors *, combinators +, >, ~, ' ', || and negation pseudo-class :not() which does not have any specificity value.

Now we need to know how the browser calculates the specificity value and what happens when they are combined. The total value for a given combination of selectors is calculated by the priority of the selectors present and the number of occurrence of that selector. You can visualize it from the below image.

Here we have 2 elements body and div and 2 classes parentClass and ChildClass. That is why we get 2 in each selectors position, because number of occurrences are added along with priority.

You can check this for more examples.
For more details, you can refer this

If you have reached here, I hope you will be able to avoid !important and use higher specificity instead.
Thank you, happy styling!

DEV Community: Debjit Sinha

Stop using '!important' in css - css specificity explained in shortest possible way