To follow up with what others have shared regarding !important, one of the major reasons you see "!important" in these major corporate websites is Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 7 will ignore !important, while other browsers will not. So often, the "all other browsers" property is used with !important, and the IE property is not.
Another reason - which I've never been okay with, is website content management systems. Many WCMS have rich text editors that allow a content author to style content. The CSS author uses !important to prevent those styles from making it into the published website. In modern browsers, though, !important still overrides your cascade. Outside of using it as an IE hack, I recommend avoiding it at all costs as it can really lead to the start of a bad day. smashing Magazine has a solid article on the subject, too: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2010/11/02/the-important-css-declaration-how-and-when-to-use-it/ </email> <signature id="paceaux"> Frank M Taylor http://frankmtaylor.com @paceaux </signature> On Apr 19, 2012, at 1:39 AM, David Thorp wrote: > Really? No one knows? > > I tried googling it and seeking it out on w3schools, but can't seem to find > the !important thing specifically. Just finds lots of (unhelpful) instances > of the word "important". (Search engines ignore punctuation supposedly). > > David > > > On 18/04/2012, at 6:03 AM, David Thorp wrote: > >> Greetings all... >> >> Every now and then, when I'm reading other peoples'/companies' css code, i >> see this "!important" thing added to the end of some of the lines in css. >> >> What does it do/change? >> >> Thanks! >> David. > ______________________________________________________________________ > css-discuss [css-d@lists.css-discuss.org] > http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d > List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ > List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html > Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/ ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [css-d@lists.css-discuss.org] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
