Chapter 4. Saving Time with Style 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 some 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 (Styling Groups of Tags) for the
<body> tag that sets the
color property to a dark red. Tags
that are descendants 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 descendant of that tag. So a
<p> tag inside the <body> tag is a descendant of the
<body>, while the <body> tag is an
ancestor of the <p> tag.
Descendants (think ...
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