August 2006
Beginner to intermediate
496 pages
17h 36m
English
Content preview from CSS: The Missing ManualBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 4. Saving Time with Inheritance
Children inherit traits from their parents—eye color, height, male-pattern baldness, and so on. Sometimes, we inherit traits from more distant ancestors like grandparents or great-grandparents. As you saw in the previous chapter, the metaphor of family-relations is part of the structure of HTML as well. And just like humans, HTML tags can inherit CSS properties from their ancestors.
What Is Inheritance?
In a nutshell, inheritance is the process by which CSS properties applied to one tag are passed on to nested tags. For example, a <p> tag is always nested inside of the <body> tag, so properties applied to the <body> tag get inherited by the <p> tag. Say you created a CSS tag style (Section 3.1) for the <body> tag that sets the color property to a dark red. Tags that are descendents of the <body> tag—that is, the ones inside the <body> tag—will inherit that color property. That means that any text in those tags—<h1>, <h2>, <p>, whatever—will appear in that same dark red color.
Inheritance works through multiple generations as well. If a tag like the <em> or <strong> tag appears inside of a <p> tag, then the <em> and the <strong> tags also inherit properties from any style applied to the <body> tag.
Note
As discussed in Chapter 3, any tag inside of another tag is a descendent of that tag. So a <p> tag inside the <body> tag is a descendent of the <body>, while the <body> tag is an ancestor of the <p> tag. Descendents (think kids) inherit properties ...
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