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CSS How to Make a Website Styling Web Pages and Navigation Create a Horizontal List of Links

Saundra Howard
Saundra Howard
4,688 Points
Posted by Saundra Howard
Saundra Howard
4,688 Points

Selector Specificity

Why is that when we needed to target the anchor within our nav the selector was "nav a" but when we needed to target the paragraph within our ID gallery we had to select "#gallery li a p" If we wanted to target the p element could we have also used "#gallery p" as a selector to target the paragraph? I hope that's clear.

3 Answers

Adam Little
Adam Little
6,735 Points

I think the idea is that you can't spell "specificity" without "specific".

Using '#gallery li a p' shows exactly where the paragraph element is nested in the Document Object Model (DOM).

justinburris111
justinburris111
7,836 Points
justinburris111
justinburris111
7,836 Points

Boom! Your first sentence hit it right on the mark!

justinburris111
justinburris111
7,836 Points
justinburris111
justinburris111
7,836 Points

It's just to make sure that the item selected is the one getting changed. It's making the selector more specific so that no other HTML attributes are changed.

Saundra Howard
Saundra Howard
4,688 Points
Saundra Howard
Saundra Howard
4,688 Points

Thanks Justin! It sounds like it's best to be as specific as possible so that we don't accidentally target the wrong element.

Nick Calabro
Nick Calabro
16,335 Points
Nick Calabro
Nick Calabro
16,335 Points

Things like this didn't make sense to me at first either. I don't recall this exact course, but I imagine the code is pretty simple. Once you get to building bigger sites with a lot of different parts you'll find yourself being more and more specific like that.