Huh! I did not realize that CSS custom properties had their own resolution behavior for how !important works in their values. Uh, despite writing a guide about them. 😬 But hey it’s now updated.
Stefan Judis documents it clearly. The deal is that !important is not at all used in the final value. So:
div { --color: red !important; color: var(--color); color: yellow;
}
It kinda feels like red should win, but because !important is ultimately stripped from the custom property value, yellow wins it out. And it’s not because the color declaration comes last — if color: red !important; was the first declaration, then red would win.
But it’s not like !important is just stripped and ignored; it’s used in a scoped way, affecting which custom property value wins. But then !important is gone when that value is applied. Stefan’s example:
div { /* `!important` overrules the other `--color` definitions */ --color: red !important; color: var(--color);
} .class { --color: blue;
} #id { --color: yellow;
}This feels weird (to me) as you’d think yellow declared on #id would win because it has the highest specificity. But that’s the deal with the scoped behavior — !important makes red the winner, then is applied to the color as such.