{"id":39,"date":"2025-06-23T16:46:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-23T11:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/infymyblogstst.infosysapps.com\/consumer-industries\/?p=39"},"modified":"2026-09-17T12:01:50","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T06:31:50","slug":"css-cascade-layers-vs-bem-vs-utility-classes-specificity-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/infymyblogstst.infosysapps.com\/consumer-industries\/fostering\/css-cascade-layers-vs-bem-vs-utility-classes-specificity-control.html","title":{"rendered":"CSS Cascade Layers Vs. BEM Vs. Utility Classes: Specificity Control"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>CSS is wild, really wild. And tricky. But let\u2019s talk specifically about\u00a0<strong>specificity<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>When writing CSS, it\u2019s close to impossible that you haven\u2019t faced the frustration of styles not applying as expected \u2014 that\u2019s specificity. You applied a style, it worked, and later, you try to override it with a different style and\u2026 nothing, it just ignores you. Again, specificity.<\/p>\n<p>Sure, there\u2019s the option of resorting to\u00a0<code>!important<\/code>\u00a0flags, but like all developers before us, it\u2019s always\u00a0risky and discouraged. It\u2019s way better to fully understand specificity than go down that route because otherwise you wind up fighting your own important styles.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"specificity-101\">Specificity 101<\/h2>\n<p>Lots of developers understand the concept of specificity in different ways.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The core idea of specificity is that the CSS Cascade algorithm used by browsers determines which style declaration is applied when two or more rules match the same element.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Think about it. As a project expands, so do the specificity challenges. Let\u2019s say Developer A adds\u00a0<code>.cart-button<\/code>, then maybe the button style looks good to be used on the sidebar, but with a little tweak. Then, later, Developer B adds\u00a0<code>.cart-button .sidebar<\/code>, and from there, any future changes applied to\u00a0<code>.cart-button<\/code>\u00a0might get overridden by\u00a0<code>.cart-button .sidebar<\/code>, and just like that, the specificity war begins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>CSS is wild, really wild. And tricky. But let\u2019s talk specifically about\u00a0specificity. When writing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fostering"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infymyblogstst.infosysapps.com\/consumer-industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infymyblogstst.infosysapps.com\/consumer-industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infymyblogstst.infosysapps.com\/consumer-industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infymyblogstst.infosysapps.com\/consumer-industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infymyblogstst.infosysapps.com\/consumer-industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/infymyblogstst.infosysapps.com\/consumer-industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":116,"href":"https:\/\/infymyblogstst.infosysapps.com\/consumer-industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions\/116"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infymyblogstst.infosysapps.com\/consumer-industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infymyblogstst.infosysapps.com\/consumer-industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infymyblogstst.infosysapps.com\/consumer-industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infymyblogstst.infosysapps.com\/consumer-industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infymyblogstst.infosysapps.com\/consumer-industries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}