The CSS cascade and the closely related topic of CSS selector specificity are often misunderstood in the web development community. Unfortunately, my

Should DevTools teach the CSS cascade?

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Style Pass

2021-05-22 17:00:08

The CSS cascade and the closely related topic of CSS selector specificity are often misunderstood in the web development community. Unfortunately, my impression is that many developers never learned how CSS really works.

Trending solutions such as "CSS-in-JS" and Tailwind are definitely not helping with the overall understanding of this core web technology. The missing knowledge brings up the following questions:

Side note: I'm not favoring or am advising to use any CSS solution out there. I prefer less complex frontends these days, but you do you!

I was thinking about developer education over the last few days and couldn't get the idea of teaching the cascade in the developer tools out of my head. This post proposes a small developer tools addition that I believe could help more developers understanding CSS.

Let's have a very quick and not complete CSS specificity refresher. If you want to learn more on the topic, read this MDN article about the CSS cascade or the CSS cascading specification.