The Truth About !important
Post from March 10, 2015 (↻ June 1, 2020), filed under Web Development.
This and many other posts are also available as a pretty, well-behaved ebook: On Web Development. If the optimization of CSS is of particular import to you, I’ve collected several concepts in a brief book: CSS Optimization Basics.
This was on my mind for the last eight thousand years, and I needed a quick cheeky cushion post between my latest (tech) book and upcoming closure of my one and a half years of traveling around the world. What are we waiting for.
Sometimes I wake up at night, full of agony, tears in my eyes. The Holiest Alliance Against !important
is haunting me. I see their countless crusaders gallop at innocent web developers with merciless force, incessantly blowing their deafening horns to never ever ever ever use !important
, ever; !important
, code of the wicked.
I wake up because, nonsense.
Nonsense, because !important
is an—important part of the cascade. !important
is so important, it even has its own section in the spec:
CSS attempts to create a balance of power between author and user style sheets. By default, rules in an author’s style sheet override those in a user’s style sheet
[…].However, for balance, an “!important” declaration (the delimiter token “!” and keyword “important” follow the declaration) takes precedence over a normal declaration. Both author and user style sheets may contain “!important” declarations, and user “!important” rules override author “!important” rules. This CSS feature improves accessibility of documents by giving users with special requirements (large fonts, color combinations, etc.) control over presentation.
!important
, a legitimate feature of CSS, is a tool. It’s first and foremost a critical tool for users, for who it’s what guarantees that their rules (when they ever put any in place) get applied. And it’s an important tool for authors, us web developers, not just to test (admit, 99% here have used !important
for debugging purposes) but also to come up with sometimes incredibly elegant solutions.
To ban !important
, as my nightmare-widened eyes see much too many times, resembles dogmatic over-simplification. To ban !important
doesn’t show understanding of what it’s doing and what it’s there for, and with that often looks like convenience, convenience not to be bothered to contemplate what could be behind !important
.
I won’t explain the intricacies of !important
, either. Not here. My favorite Harry, for example, attempts so already, sharing some of the issues, and what we can do instead, and likewise does Chris Coyier. I normally buy myself time by advising not to use !important
too liberally, and all the time. But the point of this post is simply to, once and for all, establish that:
!important
is important. !important
is legitimate. It’s useful. It’s not going to go away. And so instead of screaming “no !important
,” we should relax, and use (and teach to use) !important
responsibly.
About Me

I’m Jens Oliver Meiert, and I’m a web developer (engineering manager) and author. I love trying things, sometimes including philosophy, art, and adventure. Here on meiert.com I share some of my views and experiences.
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Read More
Have a look at the most popular posts, possibly including:
- New Book: “The Little Book of HTML/CSS Frameworks”
- 180 Little Stories After Traveling the World for 18 Months

Perhaps my most relevant book: CSS Optimization Basics (2018). Writing CSS is a craft. As craftspeople we strive to write high quality CSS. In CSS Optimization Basics I lay out some of the most important aspects of such CSS. Available at Amazon, Google Play Books, and Leanpub.
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