Putting Style Sheets in Perspective Inheritance To avoid a multitude of frustration, you'll need to understand the tree structure and inheritance, and how they relate to Style Sheets. Once you're faced with Style Sheets, things can look a whole lot different, especially when your style is lost after you insert a table or a list. Your document will take on the stylistic values set in the BODY declaration unless other selectors and rules are added to the style sheet.
P is the parent and B is the child.
The UL Selector in the style sheet specifies that unordered lists should be maroon, therefore all LI elements will take on the color specified unless it is overridden by inheritence. In the example above, the UL Selector in the style sheet specified that the list items should be maroon. They inherited the Arial font from the BODY Declaration, the maroon color from the UL Declaration. Had a font-family been specified in the UL declaration, it would have over ridden the BODY selector declaration. Placing the same two lists into a table produces one maroon list, and one green one.