CSS hierarchy classes and IDs

Question

I am building a menu using XHTML,CSS, and jQuery and I ran into a problem with my CSS. Here is my test page, and here is my css.

What I am having problems with is that my .subMenu class is inheriting the properties of my #menu, the background colors and sizes are the same. I am looking for a solution that leaves .subMenu as a class so I can re-use it. I got it to work by changing .subMenu to an ID. The weird thing is that I edit some of the properties in my jQuery code using the .subMenu class and it changes those.

So I was wondering if someone could let me know how to fix it and if it was a hierarchy issue if they might explain it.

Thanks, Levi

Answer 1

I think the problem is that the #menu > li a will apply that style to all links inside of the li tags, so all of the li tags inside of the submenu will also have this style. It looks to me that the only difference is in the background and foreground colors on hover, so you could fix it by changing #menu > li a and #menu > li a:hover to be #menu > li > a and #menu > li > a:hover. This way, the styles for the top level menu will only be applied to links which are directly after an li tag which are directly after the #menu item. The submenu styles can stay the same.