Filtering

Some of you may be wondering whether it matters what order you add the rule sets to your style.css document. The answer is no. CSS has an automatic filtering function where the most specific rule in CSS always takes precedence.

So if your stylesheet contained the following rule sets:

p {
    color: green;
}
p strong {
    color: red;
}

…then the text of your paragraph would be green, but where the strong tag is found in the paragraph, the text would be bold and red. In other words, the more specific styling for the <strong> text in your paragraph will override the less specific styling of the paragraph in general. This would occur regardless of the order these rule sets appear in the stylesheet.

This rule also applies to how you integrate CSS into your HTML to style your content. For example, if you link to an external stylesheet, and you add inline or internal CSS into your HTML, the inline or internal CSS will override the rules set in the external stylesheet. Similarly, the inline CSS will override the internal CSS.

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