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Adobe Certified Professional Dreamweaver study materials
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Adobe Certified Professional Dreamweaver: Styling with CSS

Adobe Certified Professional Dreamweaver · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

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Styling with CSS

Where styles live

The CSS Designer panel manages three sources: external stylesheets (linked via link), embedded style blocks in the head, and inline style attributes. Candidates must know that external sheets are cached and reused across pages, embedded styles apply to one document, and inline styles have the highest author-level specificity short of !important. The panel's All vs. Current selector modes matter: All shows every rule in the source; Current shows rules matching the selection.

Cascade, specificity, inheritance

Specificity is computed as (inline, IDs, classes/attributes/pseudo-classes, elements/pseudo-elements). Equal specificity means later source order wins. Inherited properties (color, font-family) flow to children; non-inherited ones (margin, border) do not. !important overrides normal author declarations.

Traps

  • Selector syntax errors silently kill a whole rule; one bad selector in a grouped list can invalidate the group.
  • Class vs. ID selectors: #nav outranks .nav regardless of order.
  • Pseudo-class order for links: :link, :visited, :hover, :focus, :active (LoVe HAte, with focus before active).
  • Shorthand resets: margin: 0 wipes all four sides; background shorthand can reset background-color.
  • Units: em and % are relative; rem is relative to the root font size.

Rule of thumb

When asked which rule wins, compare specificity first, then source order; only reach for !important as a last resort. Keep presentation in external sheets so site-wide changes are one edit.