What is the deal with !important

[cybershot]

I am working on a wordpress theme. I have some styles for img set way at the top of my css. Way at the bottom of my css I set some new styles for img that are inside a div with class tooltip. For some reason, the styles at the bottom refuse to behave unless I add !important. Will this hurt my code by adding a few of these? I know !important needs to be used sparingly.

[joshuanhibbert]

I wrote an answer on Quora recently in regards to !important: http://qr.ae/8Q9RC

[joshuanhibbert]

Mind sharing a reduced test case for me to have a look at?

[Noel Forte]

In terms of specificity, I’m assuming you’re referring to the CSS specificity hierarchy. Use your bowser’s web inspector and make sure that your CSS isn’t being overridden by anything that is more specific to the elements that you are trying to style. I found a great article [here](http://http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2007/07/27/css-specificity-things-you-should-know/ “arrticle on css hierarchy”) that has the hierarchy in it.

And then of course there’s always the reduced test case.

As for my opinion, I put `!important`’s all over my website whenever something else gets in the way. The only reason I would suggest not to use important, is because you want to make sure that the elements you are styling are able to be overridden by different styles in the future, say if you want to add something to some of the elements, but not all. Not so easy to do if there’s an `!important`…

Hope this helps.

[Author]

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