HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 4. Property Reference
Universal Values
Any user agent that has fully implemented the “cascading and inheritance” module will honor
the values
inherit
and
initial
on all properties. In practice (as of mid-2011), support for
inherit
is much more widespread than
initial
.
inherit
Forces the value for the property to be inherited from the element's parent element, even if
the property in question is not inherited (e.g.,
background-image
). Another way to think
of this is that the value is copied from the parent element.
initial
Forces the value of the property to be the initial value defined by the relevant CSS module.
For example,
font-style: initial
sets the value of
font-style
to
normal
regardless
of the
font-style
value that would have been inherited from the parent element. In cases
where the initial value is defined as determined by the user agent, such as
font-size
, the
value is set to the “default” defined by the user agent's preferences.
