About Our CSS Specificity Calculator
Our free CSS Specificity Calculator is an
essential
online tool for understanding CSS specificity.
It's designed for web developers, designers, and anyone learning
CSS to instantly analyze selector priority and
effectively resolve style conflicts by
calculating precise specificity scores.
How the Full Interactive Tool Works (Requires JavaScript)
When JavaScript is enabled, the calculator allows you to input
your CSS (by pasting, uploading, or linking). It then
analyzes all your CSS selectors—including
inline styles, IDs, classes, attributes, pseudo-classes,
elements, and pseudo-elements. The tool computes their
specificity values, helping you understand
how to calculate CSS selector specificity and
clearly see which rules will take precedence in your
stylesheets. It's a powerful
CSS specificity checker for conflicting styles
and a go-to
developer tool for checking CSS specificity.
Why Is CSS Specificity Important?
Understanding CSS specificity helps you:
-
Debug CSS Conflicts: Quickly identify why
some styles override others and fix issues like "CSS not
applying."
-
Optimize Stylesheets: Write more efficient
and targeted CSS, reducing the need for
!important declarations or overly complex
selectors.
-
Improve Code Maintainability: Create cleaner,
more predictable, and easier-to-manage stylesheets.
-
Learn & Teach: Visually grasp the CSS
specificity hierarchy, making it an excellent
interactive CSS specificity learning tool
when JavaScript is active.
Quick Guide: CSS Specificity Values Explained
CSS specificity determines which style rule applies if multiple
rules target the same element. Specificity is commonly
calculated as a tuple (e.g., a,b,c,d). Higher values indicate
higher specificity. Here’s a brief overview:
-
Inline Styles (e.g.,
<p style="color: red;">): Highest priority
(1,0,0,0).
-
ID Selectors (e.g.,
#header):
High priority (0,1,0,0).
-
Class Selectors, Attribute Selectors,
Pseudo-classes
(e.g.,
.button, [type="text"],
:hover): Medium priority (0,0,1,0).
-
Element Selectors & Pseudo-elements (e.g.,
div, p, ::before):
Lowest priority (0,0,0,1).
For detailed analysis of your own CSS and to easily
troubleshoot CSS specificity problems online,
please enable JavaScript to use the full features of our
CSS specificity testing tool.