the id selector is more specific than the element selector
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xml:lang='en'> <head> <title>Specificity</title> <style rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> body { font-size: 24px; } p#none { background: red; } p { background: yellow; } </style> </head> <body> <p> This paragraph has a yellow background. </p> <p id='none'> the id selector is more specific than the element selector. </p> </body> </html>