Question

Which one gets applied at the end?

• CSS from external file
• inline CSS

I have racing situation in CSS style. I have give some style to some of the elements, but user has choice to edit them via WYSIWYG editor and for persistence reason I have to store those inline CSS which are generated by WYSIWYG inside database. So when user will render file again in browser which CSS will get applied at the end?

Answer 1

Assuming equal specificity and no !important rules then there is no difference between a <link> and <style> element. They are just different syntaxes for including a stylesheet.

<link>          <!-- applied 1st --> 
<style></style> <!-- applied 2nd -->
<link>          <!-- applied 3rd -->

style attributes have, effectively, infinite specificity so get applied last (except for !important rules).

See also The Cascade