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Comment by doix | Hacker News Reader

> You still have to understand the cascade in order to use Tailwind.

Can you expand? I haven't used Tailwind, but from looking at the docs, it looks like a short-hand syntax for writing inline styles. Not exactly the same since it can take advantage of media queries and other things that you can't do with inline styles, but close enough conceptually.

Where is the cascade with Tailwind? Perhaps I completely misunderstood how it works, but I would say that it feels like it's purposefully trying kill cascading.

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There are two different things people could be referring to when they mention the "cascade".

One is CSS style inheritance. So if I do this:

  <div class="text-blue-500">
    <i>hello</i>
    <b>world</b>
  <div>

The `text-blue-500` style is going to cascade down to the descendent elements. That's just how CSS works and there's no getting around it.

The other usage of the term applies to a style of writing CSS that makes use of this cascade. So something like this:

  .card {
    color: darkgray;
  }

  .card .header {
    font-size: 20px;
  }

I think what people are referring to in this thread is the latter, which is not the cascade, but a particular approach to CSS.

I mean, the top just happens because color has 'inherit' by default. The latter is specificity, and normally what I think of when I hear "cascading". But, it turns out that isn't cascading either [0].

Cascading refers to the order stylesheets have priority when loaded by the browser. Going to have to update my definitions for the future. I always thought cascading referred to how specificity worked.

Edit: no wait, specificity is part of cascading, cascading refers to the entire process of determining which style applies, including specificity. Inheritance on the other hand is not part of cascading. My definitions were right, don't need to relearn anything.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Cascade

>But, it turns out that isn't cascading either

The order in which stylesheets are loaded and it's origin is just part of the cascading algorithm. See the "Cascading order" section https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Cascade#cas...

In truth everything mentioned above is part of the overall cascade. CSS takes almost everything into account - stylesheet ordering, rule ordering, rule specificity, etc.

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