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CSS - The initial value

Blog  •  CSS

Every once and awhile, you’re reading the CSS spec and then you encounter some not so known features or other interesting things, right? Have you heard about initial value?

The initial value, as the name implies, represents the value specified as the property’s initial value. It’s important to note that it doesn’t mean the browser default value for given property!

Quick example

Let’s say we have an anchor tag with some fancy color, like this:

a {
  color: #08C;
}

If, by whatever crazy reason I need to reset the color value to its initial value, which in this case will be #000, I can use the initialkeyword, like so:

a {
  color: initial; /* = color: #000; */
}

That’s cool, but what if instead I want to reset all CSS properties for given element to its initial value, how can I do that? Well, there’s a shorthand property called all that does exactly that (except for direction and unicode-bidi)!

So if I want to reset all the anchor’s properties value, I can simply do this:

a {
  all: initial;
}

And that’s it!

Check out Can I Use page for more information about browser support for initial value and all property.

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