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Web Development vocabulary · CSS and Layout

Specificity

Meaning in web development, with examples

/ˌspesɪˈfɪsəti/nounCommon term

In web development, specificity means: The rule CSS uses to decide which style wins when several rules target the same element: ID selectors beat class selectors, which beat element selectors.

In Turkish: seçici önceliği, özgüllük

How it is used

Comes up whenever 'my CSS isn't working'. Developers talk about high or low specificity, 'specificity wars' and overriding with !important, which is usually seen as a last resort. Inline styles beat rules in stylesheets.

Example sentences

  1. Your rule doesn't apply because the theme's selector has higher specificity.

  2. Keep specificity low so components are easy to override.

Common collocations

  • high specificity
  • specificity war
  • increase specificity
  • override with !important
  • selectorThe part of a CSS rule that says which elements the styles apply to, for example p, .button or #header.
  • CSSCascading Style Sheets: the language that controls how HTML looks, including colors, fonts, spacing, layout and animations.
  • classAn HTML attribute that gives an element one or more names, so that CSS and JavaScript can find and style a group of elements together.
  • stylesheetA file or block of CSS rules that describes how a page should look; most sites link to one or more external .css files.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: CSS and Layout

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