CSS The !important Rule


What is !important?

The !important rule in CSS is used to add more importance to a property/value than normal. In fact, if you use the !important rule, it will override ALL previous styling rules for that specific property on that element!

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Important About !important

The only way to override an !important rule is to include another !important rule on a declaration with the same (or higher) specificity in the source code – and here the problem starts! This makes the CSS code confusing and the debugging will be hard, especially if you have a large style sheet!

Here we have created a simple example. It is not very clear, when you look at the CSS source code, which color is considered most important:

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Maybe One or Two Fair Uses of !important


One way to use !important is if you have to override a style that cannot be overridden in any other way. This could be if you are working on a Content Management System (CMS) and cannot edit the CSS code. Then you can set some custom styles to override some of the CMS styles.


< p>Another way to use !important is: Assume you want a special look for all buttons on a page. Here, buttons are styled with a gray background color, white text, and some padding and border:

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The look of a button can sometimes change if we put it inside another element with higher specificity, and the properties get in conflict. Here is an example of this:

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To "force" all buttons to have the same look, no matter what, we can add the !important rule to the properties of the button, like this:

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