<snip> p.highlight {color:#f00} p {color:#000;} then all of the paragraphs will be black, including those using class="highlight", as that is the "last" colour declaration. </snip> Well, not really. The "highlight" class will appear highlighted. In this example, the relative specificity of the selector is used, not sequence. "p" has a specificity of 1 while "p.highlight" has a specificity of 11. So p.highlight rules. That's the theory at least. Various browser implementations seem to interpret this differently. http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/css/structure.html info on calculating specificity http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~dbaron/css/test/sec060403b an contrarian view Andy Hardacker http://hardacker.com