The appearance of an element in a web page depends on directly applied styles, styles applied through inheritance, and directly applied formatting.
When a web page uses styles, many factors may control the formatting for a selected web page element (text or graphic). The appearance of an element in a web page depends on formatting attributes from a directly applied style, attributes from a style applied through inheritance, attributes inherited from the browser, and finally, directly applied formatting. When modifying the appearance of web page elements, you may need to determine the source of the formatting attributes in order to make your changes.
The toolbars in the Web Page Editor show directly applied formatting. When you select a word that you have italicized, the Italic icon in the toolbar is active. To remove the italics from the word, you simply click the Italics icon to turn it off. However, formatting attributes that are applied through a style or inherited do not appear selected. If the italic attribute is applied through a style, the Italic icon does not appear active and you cannot click the icon to remove the italics. This behavior also applies to all font controls (font family, size, font color, and so on). If the style formats the paragraph text for an Arial 12 point font, those settings do not appear in the Font Family and Font Size controls on the toolbar.
Note: The Background color property in the Properties toolpane for the web page shows the background color either directly applied to the web page or set through content defaults.
Knowing the source of an element's formatting can help you determine if you want to format the element with another style, override a style with direct formatting, or edit the style. The element path and the Style Inspector are two Web Page Editor tools designed to help you work with styles. The tools can be used in combination to determine the formatting for applied and inherited style attributes.