How can i stop a custom CSS from overwriting my styles? - html

Question

Problem
I have a site built with my own styles and it looks just the way I like it. However, I want to add extra functionality by adding a custom dialog box downloaded from BootBox.
However the extensive style sheet that comes with it and is needed absolutely murders my site, butchering it in every way.
Is there anyway i can stop this by making the BootBox.css only apply to its little part of my code and not all of my site?

Answer 1

You can use LESS wich is what bootstrap uses.
Example:
#ContainerWithBootboox {
#import (less) "bootstrap.css"; //import bootstrap
}
Doc: http://lesscss.org/

Answer 2

If you only want the bootbox css to target a specific div, you'd need to prepend each bootbox css rule with the class of the target div.
So if you had
<div class="bootbox">
<!-- bootbox html here -->
</div>
and the bootbox styles were
h1 {
color: red;
padding: 0;
}
h2 {
color: blue;
margin: 10px 0;
}
Then you'd need to change it to
.bootbox h1 {
color: red;
padding: 0;
}
.bootbox h2 {
color: blue;
margin: 10px 0;
}
That said, if the bootbox css is thousands of lines of code then this may be labour intensive. It might be a matter of finding which rules specifically are borking your code and adding a specifier class to only those rules.

Answer 3

Not labour intensive, with the help of LESS or [SASS] (http://sass-lang.com),
If you use LESS, just wrap all bootbox css rules inside a parent root. For e.g.:
.bootbox {
/*move all bootbox CSS rules here*/
h1 { color: inherit;}
.someclass { color: red;}
}
It will be compiled into:
.bootbox .h1 { color: inherit }
.bootbox .someclass {color:red;}

Answer 4

You could put the BootBox code within an iframe. The css loaded by the iframe would only apply to the content within the iframe. I have used this strategy to only apply bootstrap to certain areas of my page such as tables, while leaving the rest of the page untouched.