How CSS is parsed on the browser?

We all have used CSS to build beautiful and responsive webpages. But do you know:

How browser parses the CSS?
How CSS renders the style?
How layout of the page is decided?

In this post I will try to answer the above questions in a simple manner.

CSS is parsed on the browser in 3 steps.

1. Resolve conflicting CSS declarations.
2. Process final computed CSS values.
3. Visual Formatting Model.

Here is a complete flow of these 3 steps.

Let's understand each step.

1 Resolve Conflicting CSS declarations.

• Different stylesheets are combined together.
• Resolving conflicts when more than one rule is applied to a certain element.

For ex: Which color to apply when defined twice for the same element.

Here Cascade & Specificity is at play.

2 Processing Values

All relative units (%, em, rem, vh, vw) are finally converted to absolute unit, pixels (px).

At this phase, all CSS values become computed values not the specified values.

3 The visual formatting model.

This is the algorithm that calculates boxes & determines the layout of these boxes, for each element in the render tree, to determine the page's final layout.

So, that's how CSS is parsed on the browser.

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