Since I have been playing with CSS problems I decided to try validating the CSS to see if I could clear up some of the less obvious problems. The errors were easy to take care of but the fixes for the warnings were harder to figure out. The CSS validator wanted both the foreground and background colors to be specified if either one was specified. After a little research I figured out how to get rid the majority of warnings. I wanted the warnings to go away but I wanted the browser to keep doing things the way it was doing things. I wanted it to inherit the color setting. Lo and behold, that is what they call the default behavior. So if you add a “background-color:inherit” statement in the selector, you are telling the browser that the default behavior for determining the background-color is okay with you. This statement makes the validator happy and the warning goes away. I am somewhat ambivalent about adding extra statements in the CSS to make validators happy but on the other hand, this is probably a good way to document your color selections .