CSS Cascading and Inheritance Level 3

Abstract

This CSS module describes how to collate style rules and assign values to all properties on all elements. By way of cascading and inheritance, values are propagated for all properties on all elements. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc.

Status of this document

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

One of the fundamental design principles of CSS is cascading, which allows several style sheets to influence the presentation of a document. When different declarations try to set a value for the same element/property combination, the conflicts must somehow be resolved.

The opposite problem arises when no declarations try to set a the value for an element/property combination. In this case, a value is be found by way of inheritance or by looking at the property’s initial value.

The cascading and defaulting process takes a set of declarations as input, and outputs a specified value for each property on each element.

The rules for finding the specified value for all properties on all elements in the document are described in this specification. The rules for finding the specified values in the page context and its margin boxes are described in [CSS3PAGE].

2 Importing Style Sheets: the @import rule

The @import rule allows users to import style rules from other style sheets. Any @import rules must precede all other at-rules and style rules in a style sheet (besides @charset, which must be the first thing in the style sheet if it exists), or else the @import rule is invalid. The syntax of @import is:

<import-rule> = @import [ <url> | <string> ] <media-query-list>? ;

If a <string> is provided, it must be interpreted as a url with the same value.

@import "mystyle.css";
@import url("mystyle.css");

If an @import rule refers to a valid stylesheet, user agents must treat the contents of the stylesheet as if they were written in place of the @import rule.

For example, declarations in style rules from imported stylesheets interact with the cascade as if they were written literally into the stylesheet at the point of the @import. Similarly, style rules in a stylesheet imported into a scoped stylesheet are scoped in the same way.

An @import rule can be media-dependent: such media-dependent imports include a comma-separated list of “media queries” after the URI, which specify to which media the imported style sheet applies. In the absence of any media query, the import is unconditional. (Specifying all for the medium has the same effect.)

The evaluation and full syntax of the expressions after the URL is defined by the Media Queries specification [MEDIAQ]. If the media query does not match, the rules in the imported stylesheet do not apply, exactly as if the imported stylesheet were wrapped in an @media block with the given media query. User agents may therefore avoid fetching a media-dependent import as long as the media query does not match.

@import url("fineprint.css") print;
@import url("bluish.css") projection, tv;
@import url("narrow.css") handheld and (max-width: 400px);

When the same style sheet is imported or linked to a document in multiple places, user agents must process (or act as though they do) each link as though the link were to a separate style sheet.

Note: This does not place any requirements on resource fetching, only how the style sheet is reflected in the CSSOM and used in specs such as this one. Assuming appropriate caching, it is perfectly appropriate for a UA to fetch a style sheet only once, even though it’s linked or imported multiple times.

The origin of an imported style sheet is the same as the origin of the style sheet that imported it.

2.1 Content-Type of CSS Style Sheets

The processing of imported style sheets depends on the actual type of the linked resource. If the resource does not have Content-Type metadata, or the host document is in quirks mode and has the same origin as the imported style sheet, the type of the linked resource is text/css. Otherwise, the type is determined from its Content-Type metadata.

If the linked resource’s type is text/css, it must be interpreted as a CSS style sheet. Otherwise, it must be interpreted as a network error.

3 Shorthand Properties

Some properties are shorthand properties, meaning that they allow authors to specify the values of several properties with a single property. A shorthand property sets all of its longhand sub-properties, exactly as if expanded in place.

h1 {
  font-weight: bold;
  font-size: 12pt;
  line-height: 14pt;
  font-family: Helvetica;
  font-variant: normal;
  font-style: normal;
}

h1 { font: bold 12pt/14pt Helvetica }

When values are omitted from a shorthand form, unless otherwise defined, each “missing” sub-property is assigned its initial value.

In some cases, a shorthand might have different syntax or special keywords that don’t directly correspond to values of its sub-properties. (In such cases, the shorthand will explicitly define the expansion of its values.)

If a shorthand is specified as one of the CSS-wide keywords [CSS3VAL], it sets all of its sub-properties to that keyword. (Note that these keywords cannot be combined with other values in a single declaration, not even in a shorthand.)

Declaring a shorthand property to be !important is equivalent to declaring all of its sub-properties to be !important.

3.1 Resetting All Properties: the all property

The all property is a shorthand that resets all CSS properties except direction and unicode-bidi. It only accepts the CSS-wide keywords.

The excepted properties are actually markup-level features, and should not be set in the author’s style sheet. (They exist as CSS properties only to style document languages not supported by the UA.) Authors should use the appropriate markup, such as HTML’s dir attribute, instead. [CSS3-WRITING-MODES]

4 Value Processing

Once a user agent has parsed a document and constructed a document tree, it must assign, to every element in the tree, and correspondingly to every box in the formatting structure, a value to every property that applies to the target media type.

The final value of a CSS property for a given element or box is the result of a multi-step calculation:

• First, all the declared values applied to an element are collected, for each property on each element. There may be zero or many declared values applied to the element.
• Cascading yields the cascaded value. There is at most one cascaded value per property per element.
• Defaulting yields the specified value. Every element has exactly one specified value per property.
• Resolving value dependencies yields the computed value. Every element has exactly one computed value per property.
• Formatting the document yields the used value. An element only has a used value for a given property if that property applies to the element.
• Finally, the used value is transformed to the actual value based on constraints of the display environment. As with the used value, there may or may not be an actual value for a given property on an element.

4.1 Declared Values

Each property declaration applied to an element contributes a declared value for that property associated with the element. See Filtering Declarations for details.

These values are then processed by the cascade to choose a single “winning value”.

4.2 Cascaded Values

The cascaded value represents the result of the cascade: it is the declared value that wins the cascade (is sorted first in the output of the cascade). If the output of the cascade is an empty list, there is no cascaded value.

4.3 Specified Values

The specified value the value of a given property that the style sheet authors intended for that element. It is the result of putting the cascaded value through the defaulting processes, guaranteeing that a specified value exists for every property on every element.

In many cases, the specified value is the cascaded value. However, if there is no cascaded value at all, the specified value is defaulted. The initial and inherit keywords are handled specially when they are the cascaded value of a property,

4.4 Computed Values

The computed value is the result of resolving the specified value as defined in the “Computed Value” line of the property definition table, generally absolutizing it in preparation for inheritance.

The computed value is the value that is transferred from parent to child during inheritance. For historical reasons, it is not necessarily the value returned by the getComputedStyle() function.

In general, the computed value resolves the specified value as far as possible without laying out the document or performing other expensive or hard-to-parallelize operations, such as resolving network requests or retrieving values other than from the element and its parent.

The computed value exists even when the property does not apply (as defined by the “Applies To” line). However, some properties may change how they determine the computed value based on whether the property applies to the element.

4.5 Used Values

The used value is the result of taking the computed value and completing any remaining calculations to make it the absolute theoretical value used in the layout of the document. If the property does not apply to this element, then the element has no used value for that property.

For example, a declaration of width: auto can’t be resolved into a length without knowing the layout of the element’s ancestors, so the computed value is auto, while the used value is an absolute length, such as 100px. [CSS21]

As another example, a <div> might have a computed break-before value of auto, but acquire a used break-before value of page by propagation from its first child. [CSS3-BREAK]

Lastly, if a property does not apply to an element, it has no used value; so, for example, the flex property has no used value on elements that aren’t flex items.

4.6 Actual Values

A used value is in principle ready to be used, but a user agent may not be able to make use of the value in a given environment. For example, a user agent may only be able to render borders with integer pixel widths and may therefore have to approximate the used width. Also, the font size of an element may need adjustment based on the availability of fonts or the value of the font-size-adjust property. The actual value is the used value after any such adjustments have been made.

By probing the actual values of elements, much can be learned about how the document is laid out. However, not all information is recorded in the actual values. For example, the actual value of the page-break-after property does not reflect whether there is a page break or not after the element. Similarly, the actual value of orphans does not reflect how many orphan lines there is in a certain element. See examples (j) and (k) in the table below.

4.7 Examples

5 Filtering

In order to find the declared values, implementations must first identify all declarations that apply to each element. A declaration applies to an element if:

• It belongs to a style sheet that currently applies to this document.
• It is not qualified by a conditional rule [CSS3-CONDITIONAL] with a false condition.
• It belongs to a style rule whose selector matches the element. [SELECT] (Taking scoping into account, if necessary.)
• It is syntactically valid: the declaration’s property is a known property name, and the declaration’s value matches the syntax for that property.

The values of the declarations that apply form, for each property on each element, a list of declared values. The next section, the cascade, prioritizes these lists.

6 Cascading

The cascade takes a unordered list of declared values for a given property on a given element, sorts them by their declaration’s precedence as determined below, and outputs a single cascaded value.

The cascade sorts declarations according to the following criteria, in descending order of priority:

Origin and Importance

The origin of a declaration is based on where it comes from and its importance is whether or not it is declared !important (see below). The precedence of the various origins is, in descending order:

1. Transition declarations [CSS3-TRANSITIONS]
2. Important user agent declarations
3. Important user declarations
4. Important override declarations [DOM-LEVEL-2-STYLE]
5. Important author declarations
6. Animation declarations [CSS3-ANIMATIONS]
7. Normal override declarations [DOM-LEVEL-2-STYLE]
8. Normal author declarations
9. Normal user declarations
10. Normal user agent declarations

Declarations from origins earlier in this list win over declarations from later origins.

Scope

A declaration can be scoped to a subtree of the document so that it only affects its scoping element and that element’s descendants. For example, [HTML5] defines scoped <style> elements, whose style sheets are scoped to the element’s parent.

If the scoping elements of two declarations have an ancestor/descendant relationship, then for normal rules the declaration whose scoping element is the descendant wins, and for important rules the declaration whose scoping element is the ancestor wins.

In other words, for normal declarations the inner scope’s declarations override, but for !important rules outer scope’s override.

For the purpose of this step, all unscoped declarations are considered to be scoped to the root element. Normal declarations from style attributes are considered to be scoped to the element with the attribute, whereas important declarations from style attributes are considered to be scoped to the root element. [CSSSTYLEATTR]

This odd handling of !important style attribute declarations is to match the behavior defined in CSS Levels 1 and 2, where style attributes simply have higher specificity than any other author rules. [CSS21]

Specificity

The Selectors module [SELECT] describes how to compute the specificity of a selector. Each declaration has the same specificity as the style rule it appears in. For the purpose of this step, declarations that do not belong to a style rule (such as the contents of a style attribute) are considered to have a specificity higher than any selector. The declaration with the highest specificity wins.

Order of Appearance

The last declaration in document order wins. For this purpose:

• Declarations from imported style sheets are ordered as if their style sheets were substituted in place of the @import rule.
• Declarations from style sheets independently linked by the originating document are treated as if they were concatenated in linking order, as determined by the host document language.
• Declarations from style attributes are ordered according to the document order of the element the style attribute appears on, and are all placed after any style sheets.

The output of the cascade is a (potentially empty) sorted list of declared values for each property on each element.

6.1 Cascading Origins

Each style rule has an origin, which determines where it enters the cascade. CSS defines three core origins:

Author

The author specifies style sheets for a source document according to the conventions of the document language. For instance, in HTML, style sheets may be included in the document or linked externally.

User

The user may be able to specify style information for a particular document. For example, the user may specify a file that contains a style sheet or the user agent may provide an interface that generates a user style sheet (or behaves as if it did).

User agent

Conforming user agents must apply a default style sheet (or behave as if they did). A user agent’s default style sheet should present the elements of the document language in ways that satisfy general presentation expectations for the document language (e.g., for visual browsers, the EM element in HTML is presented using an italic font). See e.g. the HTML user agent style sheet. [HTML5]

Extensions to CSS define the following additional origins:

Override

DOM Level 2 Style [DOM-LEVEL-2-STYLE] defines an interface for “override” styles, which enter the cascade at a higher level than other author rules.

Animation

CSS Animations [CSS3-ANIMATIONS] generate “virtual” rules representing their effects when running.

Transition

Like CSS Animations, CSS Transitions [CSS3-TRANSITIONS] generate “virtual” rules representing their effects when running.

6.2 Important Declarations: the !important annotation

CSS attempts to create a balance of power between author and user style sheets. By default, rules in an author’s style sheet override those in a user’s style sheet, which override those in the user-agent’s default style sheet. To balance this, a declaration can be made important, which increases its weight in the cascade and inverts the order of precedence.

A declaration is important if it has a !important annotation, i.e. if the last two (non-whitespace, non-comment) tokens in its value are the delimiter token ! followed by the identifier token important.

[hidden] { display: none !important; }

An important declaration takes precedence over a normal declaration. Author and user style sheets may contain !important declarations, with user !important declarations overriding author !important declarations. This CSS feature improves accessibility of documents by giving users with special requirements (large fonts, color combinations, etc.) control over presentation.

Important declarations from all origins take precedence over animations. This allows authors to override animated values in important cases. (Animated values normally override all other rules.) [CSS3-ANIMATIONS]

User agent style sheets may also contain !important declarations. These override all author and user declarations.

/* From the user’s style sheet */
p { text-indent: 1em !important }
p { font-style: italic !important }
p { font-size: 18pt }

/* From the author’s style sheet */
p { text-indent: 1.5em !important }
p { font: normal 12pt sans-serif !important }
p { font-size: 24pt }

6.3 Precedence of Non-CSS Presentational Hints

The UA may choose to honor presentational hints in a source document’s markup, for example the bgcolor attribute or <s> element in [HTML5]. All document language-based styling must be translated to corresponding CSS rules and either enter the cascade at the user agent level or be treated as author level rules with a specificity of zero placed at the start of the author style sheet. A document language may define whether a presentational hint enters at the UA or author level of the cascade; if so, the UA must behave accordingly. For example, [SVG11] maps its presentation attributes into the author level.

Presentational hints entering the cascade at the UA level can be overridden by author or user styles. Presentational hints entering the cascade at the author level can be overridden by author styles, but not by non-!important user styles. Host languages should choose the appropriate level for presentational hints with these considerations in mind.

7 Defaulting

When the cascade does not result in a value, the specified value must be found some other way. Inherited properties draw their defaults from their parent element through inheritance; all other properties take their initial value. Authors can explicitly request inheritance or initialization via the inherit and initial keywords.

7.1 Initial Values

Each property has an initial value, defined in the property’s definition table. If the property is not an inherited property, and the cascade does not result in a value, then the specified value of the property is its initial value.

7.2 Inheritance

Inheritance propagates property values from parent elements to their children. The inherited value of a property on an element is the computed value of the property on the element’s parent element. For the root element, which has no parent element, the inherited value is the initial value of the property.

(Pseudo-elements inherit according to a fictional tag sequence described for each pseudo-element [SELECT].)

Some properties are inherited properties, as defined in their property definition table. This means that, unless the cascade results in a value, the value will be determined by inheritance.

A property can also be explicitly inherited. See the inherit keyword.

Note that inheritance follows the document tree and is not intercepted by anonymous boxes, or otherwise affected by manipulations of the box tree.

7.3 Explicit Defaulting

Several CSS-wide property values are defined below; declaring a property to have these values explicitly specifies a particular defaulting behavior. As specified in CSS Values and Units Level 3 [CSS3VAL], all CSS properties can accept these values.

7.3.1 Resetting a Property: the initial keyword

If the cascaded value is the initial keyword, the property’s initial value becomes its specified value.

7.3.2 Explicit Inheritance: the inherit keyword

If the cascaded value of a property is the inherit keyword, the inherited value becomes the property’s specified and computed values.

7.3.3 Erasing All Declarations: the unset keyword

If the cascaded value of a property is the unset keyword, then if it is an inherited property, this is treated as inherit, and if it is not, this is treated as initial. This keyword effectively erases all declared values occurring earlier in the cascade, correctly inheriting or not as appropriate for the property (or all longhands of a shorthand).

8 Changes

8.1 Changes Since the 30 July 2013 Last Call Working Draft

The following changes were made to this specification since the 30 July 2013 Last Call Working Draft:

• Clarified interaction of media-dependent @import statements and style sheet loading requirements.

A Disposition of Comments is available.

Acknowledgments

David Baron, Simon Sapin, and Boris Zbarsky contributed to this specification.

Conformance

Document conventions

Conformance requirements are expressed with a combination of descriptive assertions and RFC 2119 terminology. The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in the normative parts of this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119. However, for readability, these words do not appear in all uppercase letters in this specification.

All of the text of this specification is normative except sections explicitly marked as non-normative, examples, and notes. [RFC2119]

Examples in this specification are introduced with the words "for example" or are set apart from the normative text with class="example", like this:

Informative notes begin with the word "Note" and are set apart from the normative text with class="note", like this:

Note, this is an informative note.

Conformance classes

Conformance to this specification is defined for three conformance classes:

style sheet

A CSS style sheet.

renderer

A UA that interprets the semantics of a style sheet and renders documents that use them.

authoring tool

A UA that writes a style sheet.

A style sheet is conformant to this specification if all of its statements that use syntax defined in this module are valid according to the generic CSS grammar and the individual grammars of each feature defined in this module.

A renderer is conformant to this specification if, in addition to interpreting the style sheet as defined by the appropriate specifications, it supports all the features defined by this specification by parsing them correctly and rendering the document accordingly. However, the inability of a UA to correctly render a document due to limitations of the device does not make the UA non-conformant. (For example, a UA is not required to render color on a monochrome monitor.)

An authoring tool is conformant to this specification if it writes style sheets that are syntactically correct according to the generic CSS grammar and the individual grammars of each feature in this module, and meet all other conformance requirements of style sheets as described in this module.

Partial implementations

So that authors can exploit the forward-compatible parsing rules to assign fallback values, CSS renderers must treat as invalid (and ignore as appropriate) any at-rules, properties, property values, keywords, and other syntactic constructs for which they have no usable level of support. In particular, user agents must not selectively ignore unsupported component values and honor supported values in a single multi-value property declaration: if any value is considered invalid (as unsupported values must be), CSS requires that the entire declaration be ignored.

Experimental implementations

To avoid clashes with future CSS features, the CSS2.1 specification reserves a prefixed syntax for proprietary and experimental extensions to CSS.

Prior to a specification reaching the Candidate Recommendation stage in the W3C process, all implementations of a CSS feature are considered experimental. The CSS Working Group recommends that implementations use a vendor-prefixed syntax for such features, including those in W3C Working Drafts. This avoids incompatibilities with future changes in the draft.

Non-experimental implementations

Once a specification reaches the Candidate Recommendation stage, non-experimental implementations are possible, and implementors should release an unprefixed implementation of any CR-level feature they can demonstrate to be correctly implemented according to spec.

To establish and maintain the interoperability of CSS across implementations, the CSS Working Group requests that non-experimental CSS renderers submit an implementation report (and, if necessary, the testcases used for that implementation report) to the W3C before releasing an unprefixed implementation of any CSS features. Testcases submitted to W3C are subject to review and correction by the CSS Working Group.

Further information on submitting testcases and implementation reports can be found from on the CSS Working Group’s website at http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/. Questions should be directed to the [email protected] mailing list.

CR exit criteria

For this specification to be advanced to Proposed Recommendation, there must be at least two independent, interoperable implementations of each feature. Each feature may be implemented by a different set of products, there is no requirement that all features be implemented by a single product. For the purposes of this criterion, we define the following terms:

independent

each implementation must be developed by a different party and cannot share, reuse, or derive from code used by another qualifying implementation. Sections of code that have no bearing on the implementation of this specification are exempt from this requirement.

interoperable

passing the respective test case(s) in the official CSS test suite, or, if the implementation is not a Web browser, an equivalent test. Every relevant test in the test suite should have an equivalent test created if such a user agent (UA) is to be used to claim interoperability. In addition if such a UA is to be used to claim interoperability, then there must one or more additional UAs which can also pass those equivalent tests in the same way for the purpose of interoperability. The equivalent tests must be made publicly available for the purposes of peer review.

implementation

a user agent which:

1. implements the specification.
2. is available to the general public. The implementation may be a shipping product or other publicly available version (i.e., beta version, preview release, or "nightly build"). Non-shipping product releases must have implemented the feature(s) for a period of at least one month in order to demonstrate stability.
3. is not experimental (i.e., a version specifically designed to pass the test suite and is not intended for normal usage going forward).

The specification will remain Candidate Recommendation for at least six months.

References

Normative References

Informative References

Index

Property index