What's the difference between an id and a class?

html css
johnnietheblack picture johnnietheblack · Feb 13, 2009 · Viewed 629.4k times · Source

What's the difference between <div class=""> and <div id=""> when it comes to CSS? Is it alright to use <div id="">?

I see different developers doing this in both ways, and since I'm self taught, I've never really figured it out.

Answer

Tyson picture Tyson · Feb 13, 2009

ids must be unique where as class can be applied to many things. In CSS, ids look like #elementID and class elements look like .someClass

In general, use id whenever you want to refer to a specific element and class when you have a number of things that are all alike. For instance, common id elements are things like header, footer, sidebar. Common class elements are things like highlight or external-link.

It's a good idea to read up on the cascade and understand the precedence assigned to various selectors: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/cascade.html

The most basic precedence you should understand, however, is that id selectors take precedence over class selectors. If you had this:

<p id="intro" class="foo">Hello!</p>

and:

#intro { color: red }
.foo { color: blue }

The text would be red because the id selector takes precedence over the class selector.

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