When to use the !important property in CSS [duplicate]

by

This is the real life scenario

Imagine this scenario

  1. You have a global CSS file that sets visual aspects of your site globally.
  2. You (or others) use inline styles on elements themselves which is usually very bad practice.

In this case you could set certain styles in your global CSS file as important, thus overriding inline styles set directly on elements.

Actual real world example?

This kind of scenario usually happens when you don’t have total control over your HTML. Think of solutions in SharePoint for instance. You’d like your part to be globally defined (styled), but some inline styles you can’t control are present. !important makes such situations easier to deal with.

Other real life scenarios would also include some badly written jQuery plugins that also use inline styles…

I suppose you got the idea by now and can come up with some others as well.

When do you decide to use !important?

I suggest you don’t use !important unless you can’t do it any other way. Whenever it’s possible to avoid it, avoid it. Using lots of !important styles will make maintenance a bit harder, because you break the natural cascading in your stylesheets.

More Related Contents:

  1. Menu does not align correctly in Safari
  2. My inline-block elements are not lining up properly
  3. How can I select the last element with a specific class, not last child inside of parent?
  4. How to make CSS3 rounded corners hide overflow in Chrome/Opera
  5. Responsively change div size keeping aspect ratio [duplicate]
  6. Bootstrap full-width with 2 different backgrounds (and 2 columns)
  7. Minimum and maximum value of z-index?
  8. How can I find an element by CSS class with XPath?
  9. Making a div vertically scrollable using CSS
  10. Matching the first/nth element of a certain type in the entire document
  11. Elongated hexagon shaped button using only one element
  12. Align image in center and middle within div
  13. CSS :first-letter not working
  14. CSS absolute position won’t work with margin-left:auto margin-right: auto
  15. Is it possible to display an .html document , or .html fragment at CSS content?
  16. What are the priorities among CSS selectors
  17. How to add button inside input [closed]
  18. CSS: How can I set image size relative to parent height?
  19. How to make images stay within the rows of a css grid container?
  20. CSS – Sticky footer [duplicate]
  21. what does -webkit-transform: translate3d(0,0,0); exactly do? Apply to body?
  22. How to center an iframe horizontally?
  23. How to Make A Chevron Arrow Using CSS?
  24. Change the column order in a css grid
  25. How to center buttons in Twitter Bootstrap 3?
  26. :before && :after pseudo elements not showing Firefox
  27. @font-face not working with specific version of Internet Explorer 11
  28. Font Awesome & Unicode
  29. CSS crop string in the middle
  30. Change image on hover

Leave a Comment