Entry

How does a parent element's style affect its child elements?

Jun 13th, 2000 05:59
Rey Nuņez, http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/cascade.html#inheritance

Inheritance refers to the intrinsic behavior of child elements taking 
on a particular property from their parent or container element. 

For example, if we declare a font-family for the BODY element in a 
global (external) style sheet, all elements in all pages linked to that 
style sheet inherit, and are rendered with, that font. 

Likewise, if a background and foreground color is declared for the DIV 
element, the styles are applied to all elements within any DIV, unless 
inline styles are defined, which take precedence. 

In general, inheritance is a flexible and powerful means to apply style 
variations, such as in our font example above. On certain occasions, 
though, inheritance can be a nuisance, such as when we do not want 
certain elements to take on an inherited style. This is where an 
understanding of defining styles based on precedence becomes 
significant. 

Not all style attributes are inherited. The W3C CSS specification 
indicates which style properties are and which aren't. For more 
information on style inheritance, please see:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/cascade.html#inheritance