Apply styles to parent and not child

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Apply styles to parent and not child

greencode

12:18 pm on Nov 5, 2013 (gmt 0)

I have a menu with dropdown submenu. The parent items are styled differently to the children but how do I do that without having to overide the parent styles on the children?

For example in the code below I don't want the children to have a hover colour and the padding and line-height of the parent. How do I specify this without having to write all of that css again for the children?

Thanks in advance for any help.


<html>
<head>
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<style type="text/css">
div#container ul li { 
text-decoration: none;
color: #33322a;
line-height: 57px;
display: inline-block;
padding: 0 12px;
}
div#container ul li:hover { 
color: blue;
}
</style>
</head>

<body>
  <div id="container"> 
    <ul> 
      <li> Parent List Item 
        <ul> 
          <li> Child List Item </li> 
        </ul> 
      </li> 
      <li> Parent List Item </li> 
      <li> Parent List Item </li> 
      <li> Parent List Item </li> 
    </ul> 
  </div> 
</body>
</html>

brandozz

12:49 pm on Nov 5, 2013 (gmt 0)

Styling the id selector should be avoided if you can, there are many drawbacks to styling the id. One being that if will cause you to have to be very specific with your classes and it's not reusable.

With that being said, the child list will inherit the styles of the parent regardless. I would give each one classes maybe "menu" and "submenu" and style from there.

greencode

12:56 pm on Nov 5, 2013 (gmt 0)

Hi @brandozz, thanks for your help with this. I'd just this second applied classes for the main menu items and styled them accordingly so the children didn't get styled as well. Thanks again.

brandozz

1:02 pm on Nov 5, 2013 (gmt 0)

@greencode no problem

drhowarddrfine

5:00 pm on Nov 5, 2013 (gmt 0)

It should be noted that there are no problems styling id and the whole purpose of using id on an element is because it's not reusable.

Being careful with id and classes inside it is no different than being careful with anything. It's a trend, lately, to tell people not to use id on elements. While I agree that using id should be limited, one should not fear using it.

lucy24

10:34 pm on Nov 5, 2013 (gmt 0)

Incidentally, the short answer to the question posed in the thread title is

.foobar {stuff-here}
.foobar * {opposite-stuff-here, with emphasis on "auto" "none" and "normal" (but not "inherit"!)}

though you should replace * with a short list of only those things that actually occur within foobar-- say p, div, ul.