Understand why CSS has no effect with the Inactive CSS rules indicator in Firefox DevTools

It’s useful when DevTools tells you that a declaration is invalid. For example, colr: red; isn’t valid because colr isn’t a valid property. Likewise color: rd; isn’t valid because rd isn’t a valid value. For the most part, a browser’s DevTools shows the declaration as crossed out with a warning () icon. It would be nice if they went a step further to tell you which thing was wrong (or both) and suggest likely fixes, but hey, I don’t wanna look a gift horse in the mouth.

Firefox is starting to go a step further in telling you when certain declarations aren’t valid, not because of a syntax error, but because they don’t meet other qualifications. For example, I tossed a grid-column-gap: 1rem on a random <p> and I was told this in a little popup:

grid-column-gap has no effect on this element since it’s not a flex container, a grid container, or a multi-column container.

Try adding either display:grid, display:flex, or columns:2. Learn more

Well that’s awful handy.

Elijah Manor has a blog post and video digging into this a bit.

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