What is the purpose of using font: inherit?

Question

I just wanted to know why font: inherit; is used in Cascading Style Sheets.

Answer 1

Not all browsers inherit font properties on all elements. Netscape 4.x was notoriously bad about about inheritance. Consider the following style:

body { background: black; color: white }

In Netscape 4.x, the color was not applied to table elements, so you would end up with the default black text inside the table on a black background.

Font properties have the same kind of deal for some elements, particularly form elements (and table elements for older browsers). It's not uncommon to see a definition like this:

table, form { font: inherit }