How to override !important?

Question

I have created a custom style sheet that overrides the original CSS for my Wordpress template. However, on my calendar page, the original CSS has the height of each table cell set with the !important declaration:

td {height: 100px !important}

Is there some way I can override this?

Answer 1

Overriding the !important modifier

1. Simply add another CSS rule with !important, and give the selector a higher specificity (adding an additional tag, id or class to the selector)
2. add a CSS rule with the same selector at a later point than the existing one (in a tie, the last one defined wins).

Some examples with a higher specificity (first is highest/overrides, third is lowest):

table td    {height: 50px !important;}
.myTable td {height: 50px !important;}
#myTable td {height: 50px !important;}

Or add the same selector after the existing one:

td {height: 50px !important;}

Disclaimer:

It's almost never a good idea to use !important. This is bad engineering by the creators of the WordPress template. In viral fashion, it forces users of the template to add their own !important modifiers to override it, and it limits the options for overriding it via JavaScript.

But, it's useful to know how to override it, if you sometimes have to.

Answer 2

Apart from overriding a style set by the style attribute, the !important should only be used when you have selectors in your style sheet with conflicting specificity.

But even when you have conflicting specificity, it is better to create a more specific selector for the exception. In your case it's better to have a class in your HTML which you can use to create a more specific selector which doesn't need the !important rule.

td.a-semantic-class-name { height: 100px; }

I personally never use !important in my style sheets. Remember that the C in CSS is for cascading. Using !important will break this.

Answer 3

Every part of the styles name has a weight, so the more elements you have that relate to that style the more important it is. For example

#P1 .Page {height:100px;}

is more important than:

.Page {height:100px;}

So when using important, ideally this should only ever be used, when really really needed. So to override the declaration, make the style more specific, but also with an override. See below:

td {width:100px !important;}
table tr td .override {width:150px !important;}

Answer 4

Override using JavaScript

$('.mytable td').attr('style', 'display: none !important');

Worked for me.

Answer 5

This can help too

td[style] {height: 50px !important;}

This will override any inline style

Answer 6

You can use higher specificity by going up in selectors.

td {height: 100px !important}
/* higher precedence */
table td {height: 200px !important}

I wrote a detailed article on how to override CSS here.

Answer 7

There are a couple of modern approaches that weren't available when this question was first asked.

1. Use :is() to set an arbitrarily high specificity to your selector

   :is(td, #A#A#A:not(*)) {height: 200px !important}

   The second selector of the selector list in the :is() sets the specificity of the whole selector but the :not(*) part means that the selector will never match any element itself. #A#A#A gives a specificity of (3,0,0) but you can safely choose whatever selector is sufficient to override the other !important setting. However, this is still something of a hack.

2. A better way is to use cascade layers. Layered !important declarations override non-layered !important declarations so you can just do:

   @layer { 
      td {height: 200px !important} 
   }
   

   By using named layers you can further override this to arbitrary levels.

Note that neither approach will allow you to override a !important setting in an HTML style attribute.

Answer 8

In any case, you can override height with max-height.

Answer 9

I found really cool trick with :not. If nothing from above helped you, then try this:

.page-width:not(.anything) {

}

Answer 10

If you're trying to override an !important tag that is defined in a class. Simply specify your property in a id tag. id has higher precedence than class.

Answer 11

I would like to add an answer to this that hasn't been mentioned, as I have tried all of the above to no avail. My specific situation is that I am using semantic-ui, which has built in !important attributes on elements (extremely annoying). I tried everything to override it, only in the end did one thing work (using jquery). It is as follows:

$('.active').css('cssText', 'border-radius: 0px !important');