When adding a new style rule for an element, the selector that Chrome generates contains the entire hierarchy instead of just the class name.
For example:
There are multiple reasons this could be happening. Without knowing the exact attributes being taken its hard to tell. Also seeing your css would help as well.
To the best I understand you are asking why when you <span class"helper">
it takes its parent div
and parent body
attributes as well.
This could be because it is itself a child of body
and div
Another logical explanation here is a working example on jsfiddle
Depending on your elements you could have something conflicting. In the case of my example the !important
tag is added giving its color
attribute precedence over the span class
But in the next line it applies fine.
<body>
<div class="container">
<span class="helper">I am being applied</span>
<div>
<span class="helper">I am helper but i am not red</span>
</div>
</div>
</body>
body > div > span {
color: red !important;
}
.helper { color: green }
It's not possible to give an exact analysis of a browser's implementation unless I look at the source itself. But what I can say is that the browser needs to ensure that the style rule that you add will only apply to that specific element in the working DOM, and classes, whose purpose is to group one or more related elements, are not very well-suited for this purpose.
Because of how classes work, the browser can't assume that your class is only assigned to that span
element, because it doesn't know how you author your HTML. The example given by NichoDiaz illustrates a simple but valid example of this: a .helper
may not necessarily be a body > div > span
, because it could very well be a body > div > div > span
instead, either now or later.
So instead of making that assumption about the helper
class (even though in your DOM only one element has it), it makes an assumption about the structure of your elements instead, which is far more reliable. Since it sees that there is only one span
that is a child of a div
that is a child of body
, it generates the selector body > div > span
for the element for which you've chosen to add a style rule. (Presumably, the reason why it starts with body >
instead of html > body >
is because body
is always a child of html
, which makes that additional constraint totally redundant.)
Of course, once you add a second span
element, the style rule will apply to that element as well. Again the browser cannot anticipate this, but you can easily modify the rule to add :nth-child(1)
to the end of the selector if you don't want the style rule applying to that new element.
If you add the second span
element before creating a new style rule on the first, you'll see that the browser generates a slightly more specific selector, body > div > span:nth-child(1)
. If it had tried to generate a selector using .helper
and not :nth-child(1)
, i.e. body > div > span.helper
, it would match both elements, which is clearly not the intended result of highlighting one element and adding a style rule for that specific element.