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CSS3: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition
book

CSS3: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

by David Sawyer McFarland
December 2012
Intermediate to advanced
648 pages
22h 14m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from CSS3: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

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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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449339456Errata Page