Test your skills: The Cascade

The aim of this skill test is to assess whether you understand universal property values for controlling inheritance in CSS.

Note: You can try out solutions in the interactive editors below. However, it may be helpful to download the code and use an online tool such as CodePen, jsFiddle, or Glitch to work on the tasks.

If you get stuck, then ask us for help — see the Assessment or further help section at the bottom of this page.

Task 1

In this task, we want you to use one of the special values we looked at in the controlling inheritance section. To write a declaration in a new rule that will reset the background color back to white, without using an actual color value.

Your final result should look like the image below:

Barely visible yellow links on a white background.

Try updating the live code below to recreate the finished example:

Download the starting point for this task to work in your own editor or in an online editor.

Task 2

In this task, we want you to make your changes by leveraging the order of cascade layers section. Edit an existing declaration, without touching the lightgreen declaration, using the cascade layer order to make the links rebeccapurple.

Your final result should look like the image below:

Barely visible yellow links on a white background.

Try updating the live code below to recreate the finished example:

Download the starting point for this task to work in your own editor or in an online editor.

Assessment or further help

You can practice these examples in the Interactive Editors above.

If you would like your work assessed or are stuck and want to ask for help:

  1. Put your work into an online shareable editor such as CodePen, jsFiddle, or Glitch. You can write the code yourself or use the starting point files linked to in the above sections.
  2. Write a post asking for assessment and/or help at the MDN Discourse forum Learning category. Your post should include:
    • A descriptive title such as "Assessment wanted for the cascade skill test".
    • Details of what you have already tried and what you would like us to do; for example, tell us if you're stuck and need help or want an assessment.
    • A link to the example you want assessed or need help with, in an online shareable editor (as mentioned in step 1 above). This is a good practice to get into — it's very hard to help someone with a coding problem if you can't see their code.
    • A link to the actual task or assessment page, so we can find the question you want help with.