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This question keeps popping up and I strongly suspect it’s because a lesson author didn’t give it much thought and included the subject way too early in the introduction to CSS, long before learners understand anything about the cascade, specificity, inheritence and importance. It should not come up until near the end of any CSS course.
A naive learner will see !important as some kind of magic bullet that solves all their problems. They would be categorically incorrect in that notion. It doesn’t solve problems, it creates them.
In answer to the question, if all the elements are of the same type, regardless how they are classed or identified, the selector rule with !important will trump them all.
An earlier topic on this subject asks roughly the same question and to that was given an HTML/CSS example to demonstrate the omnipotence of !important. It should be easy to find that topic, and when you do, study the example closely by copying it to your computer and running it. It’s a clear case of a picture being a thousand words.
Much appreciated on the second set of eyes, @oduffy, too much YouTube can wreak havoc on one’s mental state. I’m still curious as to why !important hasn’t been deprecated yet as of HTML5, if there’s almost no need to ever use it.
That is a really good question. Let’s take a look at the latest CSS specification:
CSS attempts to create a balance of power between author and user style sheets. By default, rules in an author’s style sheet override those in a user’s style sheet, which override those in the user-agent’s default style sheet. To balance this, a declaration can be made important, which increases its weight in the cascade and inverts the order of precedence.
An important declaration takes precedence over a normal declaration. Author and user style sheets may contain !important declarations, with user !important declarations overriding author !important declarations. This CSS feature improves accessibility of documents by giving users with special requirements (large fonts, color combinations, etc.) control over presentation.
!important is a very useful tool in the context it was meant to be used - in user style sheets. As a developer, you have full control over agent style sheets - there is no need to use !important.
It is a bad practice to use !important in agent style sheets and this is clearly stated by the CSS specification.
!important breaks the natural flow of precedence and specificity. It might help you solve your problem quickly, but this will lead to other problems in the future. !important is meant to be used in the user style sheets.
Sometimes we don’t have full control over the agent style sheets. Sometimes we have to work with a 3rd party library which we cannot modify or we have to deal with an API which returns markup code with inline styles applied.
This is where the use of !important is justified and it might even be the best solution in terms of the maintenance of the codebase. But this happens rarely.
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