A CSS tricky situation – the order of the CSS class names in the HTML tags

DanielSeptember 24, 2021September 29, 2021

Let's say we have the following set of rules in a CSS file:

.red {
    color: red;
}

.blue {
    color: blue;
}

.green {
    color: green;
}

And the following tags in our HTML:

<div class="red green blue"> First div.</div>
<div class="blue red green"> Second div.</div>
<div class="green blue red"> Third div.</div>

The question is: what color will we have for these divs? Stop for a few seconds and try to answer the question.

The correct answer: they’re all green.

The order of the class names in HTML tags has no importance on the styles. The lines class="red green blue", class="blue red green" or class="green blue red" are the same thing.

All 3 selectors have the same specificity (just a simple class selector). And given that .green comes later in the stylesheet, it will override the .red and .blue selectors.

Therefore all the divs will have the color green. Cascading wins again.

By the way, this can make a great CSS interview question 🙂