That is, values are inherited from parent elements to child elements as described in Chapter 2. Cascading, in contrast, works horizontally. All rules that apply to an element, no matter what style sheet they come from, are collected and subsequently sorted. In the cascading order, rules coming from the browser default style sheet have the lowest priority, followed by user style sheets and designer style sheets. See Figure 11.1.
Inheritance moves values from parent elements to child elements.
Cascading collects rules that apply to the same elements. If you don't fully grasp the differences yet, don't worry. The following examples demonstrate how cascading and inheritance work. Here's a simple example of cascading and inheritance in action. First, the cascading mechanism gets to work.