Inheritance

Many html elements inherit the style rules of any elements within which they are enclosed.

Example - The bold tags are styled as red.
The italic text inherits the colour red because it is within the bold tags so it inherits red as its colour.

some bold, red text that is also italic

Here is the code

<head>
<style type='text/css'>
b {color:red}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<b>some bold, red text that is also <i> italic</i></b>
</body>

In practice, inheritance is less than reliable as it does not apply to all elements.

Using older browsers such as Netscape 4 also creates problems.