Why does this element does not respect specificity rules? - css

So I was tweaking the Firefox built-in reader mode using Stylish extension. The first thing I did was to change the font:
body.loaded.serif div#moz-reader-content, h1#reader-title, div#reader-credits{
font-family: "Marion";
}
It worked fine. Later on I wanted to tweak the links:
a{
text-decoration: none;
}
And the links stay unchanged. I can see in Firebug that this declaration is overriden by the default style declaration (as in "aboutReaderContent.css") which also used a single selector. Then I tried making it more specific:
html body.serif.loaded div.content div#moz-reader-content p a{
text-decoration: none;
}
Still no effect. Firebug says it was still overriden. I had to resort to !important.
My question is, why did this element does not follow the specificity rule? As I understand it, even in multiple files, browser will follow the most "specific" selector regardless the order these files are loaded. To add to my confusion, the first tweak actually overrode the default stylesheet, but that's in another file "aboutReader.css". What am I missing?

Related

Margin in angular global styles are not enforced

I created a global CSS file. It is working perfectly, except that I am unable to set margins.
For Example CSS:
.update_date {
font-size: small;
text-align: right;
margin: 0;
}
This is a CSS style for class update_date. When I use it, except margin, everything is applied. It's the same case with every other class. None of these classes are overridden in any other place.
Can someone provide a workaround on how I can set margins globally.
Environment:
Angular 10/11
Try using
.update_date {
font-size: small;
text-align: right;
margin: 0 !important;
}
this happens because that style is getting overridden by another
You should avoid "!important" if you can. It can cause unintended styling issues later down the line - see below.
My suggestion: In your browser, use your "Inspect Element" (Ctrl + Shift + I) tool to figure out where in the DOM Tree your styling is coming up and what is overriding it. This will help identify if !Important is truly the only solution you can use.
Inspect Element Tool Picture Example
Hard to say with your code snippet what is actually happening and being this post is 1.5 years old, you may already know this info. But I didn't see any other responses, so just wanted to raise awareness to the "!important" property.
More about !Important
From W3 Schools (I am sure you can find this elsewhere as well): https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_important.asp
"Tip: It is good to know about the !important rule, you might see it in some CSS source code. However, do not use it unless you absolutely have to."

How to remove CSS underline?

I have a blog but most text seems to get underlined automatically. I am trying to find the text-decoration: underline but I can't seem to locate it. This is my blog
www.latestforpc.com
This is the line that causes the underline but I can't find it in style.css
a:-webkit-any-link {
color: -webkit-link;
text-decoration: underline;
cursor: auto;
}
Web browsers are designed to add default styling to page elements even without that styling being explicity mentioned in the page's stylesheet. In order to change this default behavior, you have to add this code to style.css:
a { text-decoration: none; }
This will overwrite the browsers default styling for your links, and in this case, remove the underline.
If you inspect a link in your browser, like you did, you can find that style, and it also shows you in which CSS file the style is declared.
In this case it says 'User agent stylesheet'. That actually means that it is a default style in your browser (the stylesheet that is built in into your user agent). So that's why you cannot find it.
Now, to fix it, you can add a rule to style.css that overrules this default style:
a {
text-decoration: none;
}
That should be enough. The styles in your css file have higher priority than the defaults of the browser.
Just add the following at the bottom of your CSS;
a {
text-decoration: none;
}
and if you want your links to appear underlined when hovering over them, also add;
a:hover {
text-decoration: underline;
}
Done!
It looks like you have multiple style sheets on your site, so that style could be in any of the style sheets. You might try adding the following in your master css file to override the other style sheets:
a { text-decoration: none !important;}
There are many "browser stylesheets" in browsers like user agent stylesheet in chrome. They are pretty good but sometimes we need to get rid of them. So we use "reset.css"
Or you can only add
* {text-decoration:none;}
if you just want to get rid of the underline

Reset link colour to browser default

Is there a way to reset visited and unvisited link colours to the browser default after they have been changed?
In my specific situation, I have a main style file containing:
a:link { color: black; }
a:visited { color: black; }
And I would like to have a few specific links rendered with the default colours.
EDIT: Here is a jsFiddle to play with. I would like a style for the default class that makes it match the browser default.
Edit:
Another way is avoiding the problem from the beginning. Give the special links you want to be with the default style a special class (let's call it .default), and instead of:
a:link { color: black; }
a:visited { color: black; }
Use the not pseudo class and write:
a:not(.default):link { color: black; }
a:not(.default):visited { color: black; }
Notice that this pseudo class doesn't work on IE 8 and lower. For them you can use a special CSS (I don't like it, but it'll work).
It is different for each browser.
What you would have to do is get a stylesheet from the browser you are trying to reset (Gecko, WebKit, or Trident) and make that the new default.
Source: Browsers' default CSS for HTML elements
What you're looking for is revert keyword, but it's not yet implemented in most browsers, currently only Safari supports it. The links to track the development per browser are listed in the Browser compatibility section on MDN.
Some day this should work everywhere:
a { color: red; }
a.reverted { color: revert; }
red <a class="reverted" href="#">default</a> red
But for now think about a workaround. The feature is just not there yet.
If that is the only css controlling your a tags then just remove those and that will take off any styling. You could also just change the color?? Like so...
a:link {color: blue;}
a:visited {color: purple;}
Nowadays we can do something like this:
<head>
<style>
:link { color: black; }
:visited { color: black; }
.default-color :link { color: LinkText; }
.default-color :visited { color: VisitedText; }
</style></head>
<body>
<a href='#'>link</a>,
<span class='default-color'>
<a href='#'>link</a></span></body>
The second link renders with default colours.
See: CSS Color Module § System Colors
You can only fiddle with the URL. Browsers record the URLs they've visited. If they're rendering a page, and a particular URL appears in that list, then url is colored as "visited".
You can't force a browser to treat a URL as visited, unless they've actually been there. But you CAN make a visited URL appear as "new" by adding something different to the url, so that it APPEARS new to the browser. e.g.
example.com/foo.php
example.com/foo.php?random=value
both point at the same script, but the browser will treat both as "different". If that random value changes each time, the the browser will effectively think each time it's a brand new url and color it as "new".
I guess one question to ask here is: why? Why would you want to do that in the first place? To my knowledge, there's no W3C standard delineating what default link colors should be, anyways. A value (such as default) for color wouldn't make sense at all, seeing as that the isn't a default value.
With that being said, the most logical way to go about this would to just style things yourself. I'm not sure what situation your in, but whatever the case is, I'm pretty sure you're doing something wrong if you're asking how to restore colors to the browser default. So, before I give you a rather dry solution, I'll ask: can you give us some context? In the case that you're making something like menu bar links and you don't want the same styling for those menu bar links to leak into your normal links, you should really be using some kind of container to select those links in.
Anyways, here comes that dry solution. Most browsers use blue for links, purple for visited links, and red for active links. So, something like the following would work for browsers that go by these colors (assuming that the user hasn't modified the browsers' styling sheet, in which case you may want to learn about that or use something like initial, examined in Itay's answer).
a:link, a { color: blue; }
a:visited { color: purple; }
a:active { color: red; }
enter code herea.class{
color:inherit;
}
Specifies that the color should be inherited from the parent element.
so if your body was color:blue; then followed by a.class{color:inherit} then those examples would be blue. at the same time, you could just use a.class:link{color:blue}. and another for when you visit the link.
Your best with just customizing classes of links of special interest and leaving the rest by default.
No, you cannot set any CSS property to the browser default if it has been changed (i.e., if there is any style sheet being applied that assigns a value to the property. This follows from basic principles of CSS.
So consider asking a different question. There are ways to limit the effect of CSS rules to specific elements, instead of e.g. preventing all links from looking like links.
Just style the ones you want to style by setting a class on them.
.class:link{}
.class:visited{}
Then leave the others default.
You can use this:
a {
color: inherit;
}
That will inherit, and as there is no other link color so the browser will give the link its own style!

How much weight does a pseudo class have?

I'm working in a DNN environment where the default style sheet which every site loads sets styles for pseudo-classes. I could edit the default style sheet, but since this is stock and comes with all upgrades, I'd prefer to leave it alone and override their styles at the skin level.
Does anyone know of a solution to get all these pseudo classes to start listening to the standalone element again?
A:link
{
text-decoration: none;
color: #003366;
}
A:visited
{
text-decoration: none;
color: #003366;
}
A:hover
{
text-decoration: underline;
color: #ff0000;
}
A:active
{
text-decoration: none;
color: #003366;
}
Also, would a:hover {} always beat out selector a {} no matter how strong selector is?
EDIT:
I'm not wanting to use !important as I'll have to use important everywhere, and I don't want to embed any style to the document.
My presumption is that a:link{text-decoration:none;} will only ever be overridden with the same pseudo class and my hope is that there's a way around having to always define pseudo classes to every a tag.
If you include the declarations inside <style> tags in the HTML itself it will overwrite any styles set in external stylesheets.
Another solution is to create a second CSS document to override the existing CSS. Make sure you include this CSS file after you include the existing CSS file (for IE 6 compat). Then use the !important tag on all styles you want to override.
For more information refer to the section of the W3 specs regarding CSS cascading.
Edit: To answer your second question. a:hover{} would beat out selector a{}, but selector a:hover{} would beat out a:hover{}.
Also, would a:hover {} always beat out selector a {} no matter how strong selector is?
It depends: the more-specific selector will win in the case of conflicting attributes being set; otherwise, they will be additive. (Unless, of course, you're doing things with !important...)
I just tested the load time while using :first-child and :last-child. The difference seemed to be around 8ms for each (on my local machine) although I'm not positive on if that grows by factors the more you use.

CSS Reset, default styles for common elements

After applying a CSS reset, I want to get back to 'normal' behavior for html elements like: p, h1..h6, strong, ul and li.
Now when I say normal I mean e.g. the p element adds spacing or a carriage return like result when used, or the size of the font and boldness for a h1 tag, along with the spacing.
I realize it is totally up to me how I want to set the style, but I want to get back to normal behavior for some of the more common elements (at least as a starting point that I can tweak later on).
YUI provides a base CSS file that will give consistent styles across all 'A-grade' browsers. They also provide a CSS reset file, so you could use that as well, but you say you've already reset the CSS. For further details go to the YUI website. This is what I've been using and it works really well.
One of the rules in applying CSS styles is "last in wins." This means if your CSS reset styles set elements to margin:0; padding:0 you can then override these rules by declaring your desired values for the same elements afterwards.
You can do this in the same file (YUI offers a one-liner reset I think so I sometimes include it as the first line in my CSS file) or in a separate file that appears after the reset CSS <link/> tag.
I think by normal behavior you mean "the defaults for my favorite browser." Your building up CSS rules for these elements is a part of the reset exercise.
Now you might want to look into Blueprint CSS or other grid frameworks. These grid frameworks almost always first reset styles to nothing, then build up the typography for common elements, etc. This could save you some time and effort.
You mean like:
* {
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
}
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, form, label, ul, ol, dl, fieldset, address {
margin-bottom: 1em;
}
?
Actually, sorry I mis-read your question, you're after something more like Eric Meyer's total reset # http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/
Rather than using a total CSS reset, think about using something like Normalize, which "preserves useful defaults".
To find out what your browser thinks of as default, open a plain HTML file with lists and view the lists with a CSS debugger like Firebug, and look under the Computed tab.
Check out YUI (Yahoo's open source user interface conventions).
They have a base stylesheet that undoes their own reset css.
They dont actaully recommend you use it in production - since its counter productive but definitely might be worth checking out the file to get relevant snippets for what you want to 'undo'.
I recommend you watch the 40 minute talk to get up to speed.
Heres a short snippet of their base.css file :
ol li {
/*giving OL's LIs generated numbers*/
list-style: decimal outside;
}
ul li {
/*giving UL's LIs generated disc markers*/
list-style: disc outside;
}
dl dd {
/*giving UL's LIs generated numbers*/
margin-left:1em;
}
th,td {
/*borders and padding to make the table readable*/
border:1px solid #000;
padding:.5em;
}
th {
/*distinguishing table headers from data cells*/
font-weight:bold;
text-align:center;
}
Download the full stylesheets below or read full documentation.
Yahoo reset css | Yahoo base (undo) reset css
I'm personally a big fan of BlueprintCSS. It resets styles across browsers and provides some really convenient defaults (that are what you want 90% of the time). It also provides a layout grid, but you don't have to use that if you don't need it.
If you want to see the css defaults for firefox, look for a file called 'html.css' in the distribution (there should be some other useful css files in the same directory). You could pick out the rules that you want, and apply them after a reset.
Also, the CSS2 standard has a sample stylesheet for html 4.
Normal behaviour for WebKit h1:
h1 {
display: block;
font-size: 2em;
margin: .67__qem 0 .67em 0;
font-weight: bold
}
Normal behaviour for Gecko h1:
h1 {
display: block;
font-size: 2em;
font-weight: bold;
margin: .67em 0;
}
The rest of the elements should be there if you search the files.
"After applying a CSS reset, I want to get back to 'normal' behavior for html elements..."
If you've applied a reset, you would then have to add the rules for what you believe to be normal behavior. Since normal behavior varies from browser to browser this question is something of a non sequitur. I like #da5id's answer - use one of the many available resets and tweak it to suit your needs.
Once you have assigned a value to a CSS property of an element, there is no way getting back the “normal” value for it, assuming “normal” means “browser default”, as it seems to mean here. So the only way to have, say, an h1 element have the browser default font-size is to not set the property at all for it in your CSS code.
Thus, to exempt some properties and elements from CSS reset, you need to use a more limited CSS reset. For example, you must not use * { font-size: 100% } but replace * by a list of selectors, like input, textarea { font-size: 100% } (the list could be rather long, but e.g. browser defaults for font-size differ from 100% for a few elements only).
It is of course possible to set properties to values that you expect to be browser defaults. There is no guarantee that this will have the desired effect on all browsers, current and future. But for some properties and elements, this can be relatively safe, because the defaults tend to be similar.
In particular, you might use section Rendering in HTML5 CR. It describes “expected rendering” – not a requirement, though browser vendors may decide to claim conformance to them if they so wish, and generally this will probably keep implementations rather similar in this respect. For example, for h1 the expected settings are (collected here into one rule – in HTML5 CR they are scattered around):
h1 {
unicode-bidi: isolate;
display: block;
margin-top: 0.67em;
margin-bottom: 0.67em;
font-size: 2.00em;
font-weight: bold;
}
(There are additional contextual rules. E.g., nesting h1 inside section is expected to affect the settings.)
I'm not resetting all the elements by default because the default styles are somehow browser depended, so they varies from browser to browser. Instead of using something like ul, ol { list-style: none; }, I'm adding a CSS class like r or reset and then I specify that if that is a ul which has a r class, reset it or otherwise please leave it to be untouched.
By the way you need to add class="reset" (for example) to all of those elements, which is extra work and code, however you'd have all of your default styles untouched at the end in return!

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