This guide assumes that you're familiar with inspecting CSS in Chrome DevTools. See View and change CSS to learn the basics.
Inspect the CSS you author
Suppose that you added some CSS to an element and want to make sure the new styles are applied properly. When you refresh the page, the element looks the same as before. Something is wrong.
The first thing to do is inspect the element and make sure that your new CSS is actually applied to the element.
Sometimes, you'll see your new CSS in the Elements > Styles pane but your new CSS is in pale text, non-editable, crossed out, or has a warning or hint icon next to it.
Understand CSS in the Styles pane
The Styles pane recognizes many kinds of CSS issues and highlights them in different ways.
Matched and unmatched selectors
The Styles pane shows matched selectors in regular text and unmatched ones in pale text.
Invalid values and declarations
The Styles pane crosses out and displays warning icons next to the following:
- An entire CSS declaration (property and value) when the CSS property is invalid or unknown.
- Just the value when the CSS property is valid but the value is invalid.
Overridden
The Styles pane crosses out properties that are overridden by other properties according to the Cascading order.
In this example, the width: 300px; style attribute on the element overrides width: 100% on the .youtube class.
Inactive
The Styles pane displays in pale text and puts information icons next to properties that are valid but have no effect because of other properties.
These pale properties are inactive because of CSS logic, not the Cascading order.
In this example, the display: block; property disables justify-content and align-items that control flex or grid layouts.
Inherited and non-inherited
The Styles pane lists properties in Inherited from <element-name> sections depending on their default inheritance:
- Inherited by default are in regular text.
- Non-inherited by default are in pale text.
Shorthand
Shorthand (concise) properties let you set multiple CSS properties at once and can make your stylesheet more readable. However, due to the short nature of such properties, you may miss a longhand (precise) property that overrides a property implied by the shorthand.
The Styles pane displays shorthand properties as drop-down lists that contain all the properties that are shortened.
In this example, two of four shortened properties are actually overridden.
Non-editable
The Styles pane displays properties that can't be edited in italic text. For example, the CSS from the following sources can't be edited:
user agent stylesheet—Chrome's default stylesheet.Style-related HTML attributes on the element, for example, height, width, color, etc. You can edit them in the DOM tree and this updates the CSS in the Styles pane, but not the other way around.
In this example, the
height="48"attribute on an<svg>element is set to50. This updates the corresponding property undersvg[Attributes Style]in the Styles pane.
Inspect an element that still isn't styled the way you think
To try to find what goes wrong, you may want to check:
- CSS documentation and selector specificity in the tooltips in the Styles pane.
- The Computed pane to see the "final" CSS applied to an element and compare to that you declared.
The Elements > Styles pane displays the exact set of CSS rules as they are written in various stylesheets. On the other hand, the Elements > Computed pane lists resolved CSS values that Chrome uses to render an element:
- CSS derived from inheritance
- Cascade winners
- Longhand properties (precise), not shorthand (concise)
- Computed values, for example,
font-size: 14pxinstead offont-size: 70%
Understand CSS in the Computed pane
The Computed pane also displays various properties differently.
Declared and inherited
The Computed pane lists the properties declared in any stylesheet in regular font, both element's own and inherited. Click the expand icon next to them to see their source.
To see the declaration in the Styles pane, hover over the expanded property and click the arrow button.
To see the declaration in the Sources pane, click the link to the source file.
For properties with multiple sources, the Computed pane shows the Cascade winner first.
Runtime
The Computed pane lists property values calculated at runtime in pale text.
In this example, Chrome calculated the following for the <ul> element:
- The
widthrelative its parent,<div> - The
heightrelative to its children, the two<li>elements
Non-inherited and custom
To make the Computed pane show all properties and their values, check Show all. All properties include:
- Initial values for non-inherited properties in pale text.
- Custom properties—with a
--prefix in regular text. Such properties are inherited by default.
To break this big list into categories, check Group.
This example shows the initial values for non-inherited properties under Animation and custom properties under CSS Variables.
Search for duplicates
To investigate a specific property and its potential duplicates, type that property name in the Filter textbox. You can do this both in the Styles and Computed panes.
See Search and filter an element's CSS.