The CSS Cascade Still Hides Surprises
Frontend developers who think they've mastered the cascade might want to reconsider. Active transition styles can override !important rules, while active animation styles cannot — a distinction that isn't widely known.
The cascade also includes "origins" that act like a secret layer of specificity. These origins reverse their ordering when !important rules come into play, adding another hidden dimension to how styles resolve.
There's also ongoing discussion about opening origins to user-authored levels. The idea is to load a framework like Bootstrap at a lower origin on purpose, placing your own styles at a higher origin so anything you write wins. The proposal has its appeal — the power to override anything is clearly useful — but it's also concerning. You'd no longer be able to look at a selector and know if it wins; you'd need to track origin information, which is likely buried in another file loaded in any number of ways.
