Apart from Floats, CSS Specificity is one of the most difficult concepts to grasp in Cascading Stylesheets. The different weight of selectors is usually the reason why your CSS-rules don’t apply to some elements, although you think they should have. In order to minimize the time for bug hunting you need to understand, how browsers interpret your code. And to understand that, you need to have a firm understanding on how specificity works. In most cases such problems are caused by the simple fact that somewhere among your CSS-rules you’ve defined a more specific selector.
CSS Specificity isn’t simple. However, there are methods to explain it in a simple and intuitive way. And that’s what this article is all about…