In the last exercise, instead of selecting all <h5>
elements, you selected only the <h5>
elements nested inside the .description
elements. This CSS selector was more specific than writing only h5
. Adding more than one tag, class, or ID to a CSS selector increases the specificity of the CSS selector.
For instance, consider the following CSS:
p { color: blue; } .main p { color: red; }
Both of these CSS rules define what a <p>
element should look like. Since .main p
has a class and a p
type as its selector, only the <p>
elements inside the .main
element will appear red
. This occurs despite there being another more general rule that states <p>
elements should be blue
.
Instructions
To show how specificity increases with additional selectors, let’s create another ruleset with the descendant combinator and then compare it to a ruleset without.
In style.css, write a ruleset using the descendant combinator to select the <h4>
elements nested in the <li>
elements. Inside of the curly braces, write:
color: gold;
Click Run and then scroll down the page to see the <h4>
elements under “More Destinations” appear gold.
Now, create a ruleset targeting elements with just the h4
type, and add a declaration of:
color: dodgerblue;
Will the <h4>
elements turn blue? Click “Run” to find out.
The elements stay gold because there is a more specific selector for <h4>
elements you wrote in the last step. Because of the more specific CSS selector (li h4
), the more general selector of h4
will not take hold.