July 5, 2000 - Resolving Style Conflicts

Yehuda Shiran July 5, 2000
Resolving Style Conflicts
Tips: July 2000

Yehuda Shiran, Ph.D.
Doc JavaScript

Now that Cascaded Style Sheets have become popular, you need to pay attention to conflicts in style specifications as it's possible to inadvertently specify conflicting styles to the same element. Here's an example: 

<STYLE>
  .kuku { 
    background-color:yellow;
    width:50;
    height:50;
  }
</STYLE&gt

and now you also specify a table with two cells: 

<TABLE BORDER=1>
<TR>
<TD CLASS="kuku" STYLE="background-color:tan">Come back to docjavascript.com for a new tip every day</TD>
<TD CLASS="kuku" BGCOLOR="tan">Come back to docjavascript.com for a new column every two weeks</TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>

which looks like this:

Come back to docjavascript.com for a new tip every day Come back to docjavascript.com for a new column every two weeks
Notice that the left cell colored tan by the local STYLE specifications. The right cell is colored yellow, because there is only a BGCOLOR specification that does not override the global kuku class definition. We can conclude that particular STYLE definitions override global statements, while element attributes take precedence over global STYLEs.