CSS - red font to Twitter Bootstrap - css

Question

I have defined a class in my main.css file.
.red {
color: #d14;
}
And using it like this.
<div class="navbar">
<div class="navbar-inner">
<ul class="nav">
<li class="active red">
<i class="icon-leaf icon-white"></i>Admin
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
Besides my main.css I also import the twitter bootstrap css file.
This way it does not work. Is it because Bootstrap is overruling my color definition?

Answer 1

The only element in your markup that could visually apply this style is the <a>, and that element has a lot of really specific CSS rules applied to it by Twitter Bootstrap, stuff like this:
.navbar .nav .active > a,
.navbar .nav .active > a:hover {
color:#FFFFFF;
}
You'll have to write something even more specific to get the style to apply:
.navbar .navbar-inner .nav .red a {
color: #d14;
}
Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/pYGaG/
You could use !important on the rule if you really had to, but I really feel that you should avoid it as much as possible. If this is a single element that has this style, consider adding an id to it, which carries a lot of weight specificity-wise:
<li class="active" id="home_link">
<i class="icon-leaf icon-white"></i>Admin
</li>
#home_link a {
color: #d14;
}
http://jsfiddle.net/pYGaG/1/
Here are a couple good articles on CSS specificity:
http://css-tricks.com/specifics-on-css-specificity/
http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/css_specificity_wars.html
And as a side note, try to avoid presentational class names like red. Use more meaningful ones that aren't tied to the way it should look, but what it is (for example, .active-link).

Answer 2

Your're defining the red color on a <li>-Tag, but there is no text. The text is inside the <a>-Tag, so you need to overwrite this rule.
Code something like this:
.red a {
color: #d14;
}
Update: Go for the answer given by Wesley Murch.