Not only do browser and user styles hold these important positions, but both are distinctive when compared to the other kinds of style sheets you’ll now be focusing on in this and the next several articles within the series. Browser styles are determined by the software engineers who developed the browser. User styles are designed by those users who have some special need or desire to override other styles. Inline styles, along with linked, embedded and imported styles (which I’ll be discussing in later articles) are grouped together under the umbrella name of Author Styles. Author styles, as is true to their name, are created by the web page author and are applied to an element, page, or entire site depending upon how they are used.
CSS From the Ground Up: Inline Style
Inline Style
Used in Dreamweaver for some time to manage the Draw Layer feature, inline styles play an important role within the Cascade. Because inline styles are applied to a single element only, this gives designers an unambiguous, precise ability to hone in on styling that one element. But that level of control also carries a price, as you’ll soon find out.
In the first two articles of this series, Browser Styles and User Styles I described how browser styles and user styles can be considered opposite ends of the application hierarchy that is the Cascade. Browser styles are at the bottom-most level, and user styles are at the top-most level (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The hierarchy so far: User styles dominate the Cascade, browser styles are at the bottommost level. Inline style is more powerful than other author styles and browser style, but can be overridden by user style.
molly holzschlag
Coined "one of the greatest digerati" and deemed one of the Top 25 Most Influential Women on the Web, there is little doubt that in the world of Web design and development, Molly E. Holzschlag is one of the most vibrant and influential people around. With over 25 Web development book titles to her credit, Molly currently serves as Communications Director for the World Organization of Webmasters.
As a steering committee member for the Web Standards Project (WaSP), Molly works along with a group of other dedicated Web developers and designers to promote W3C recommendations. She also teaches Webmaster courses for the University of Arizona, University of Phoenix, and Pima Community College. She wrote the very popular column, Integrated Design, for Web Techniques Magazine for the last three years of its life, and spent a year as Executive Editor of WebReview.com.