Why do browsers match CSS selectors from right to left?

Question

CSS Selectors are matched by browser engines from right to left. So they first find the children and then check their parents to see if they match the rest of the parts of t

Answer 1

It allows for cascading from the more specific to the less specific. It also allows a short circuit in application. If the more specific rule applies in all aspects that the parent rule applies to, all parent rules are ignored. If there are other bits in the parent, they are applied.

If you went the other way around, you would format according to parent and then overwrite every time the child has something different. In the long run, this is a lot more work than ignoring items in rules that are already taken care of.