What is !important in CSS and what is the purposse of it?

As we know CSS styles works from top to bottom, suppose you have created two class with the same name or define the style of any element at two places, which one will apply on your page, can you guess which one will apply, yes you are right the last one because CSS works from top to bottom.

Let's see this with some examples

div{color:black;}
....................
...................
div{color:green;}

On the page all the div color will be green, what if you want to apply the black color from the top one style? you need to use the !important so it can override other color at the bottom.

div{color:black !important;}
....................
...................
div{color:green;}

Now the page will use color black because we used !important here.

What will happen if both will have !important? in that case last will be used

div{color:black !important;}
....................
...................
div{color:green !important;}

In this case green color will be used from the last one.

As we know if we are using class and inline style then inline style is used, but what will happen if class have !important rule? see this.

 <div class="grid1" style="background-color:green">
    Text to test!!!
 </div>
 .grid1{background-color: red;}

If you are not using !important then div background color will be green because inline style will be used.

 .grid1{background-color: red !important;}

After adding the !important to the class, div background color will be red, it will override the inline style.

<div  class="grid1" style="background-color:green !important">
    Text to test!!!
 </div>

Now I changed the inline style by using !important, so the div background color will be green.

So we can say !important is helpful when we are using CSS files from some other libraries and we don't want that library can override our existing CSS then we can use !important with our classes to make sure that no other css can override our class.

Mike .Net
  • css
  • html
By Mike .Net On 28 Jan, 13  Viewed: 487

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