Does the order of rules in a CSS stylesheet affect rendering speed?

Question

While this could possibly result in a simple yes or no answer I\'ll go for it anyway

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Consider the following example:

HTML

Answer 1

I can't speak to order of the rules as it relates to speed.

However, as CSS stands for Cascading Stylesheets I consider it a moot point as the order of your rules does matter. So you aren't necessarily at liberty to move them around freely. Unless of course you supply continually more specific selectors (i.e. html body div.foo), which I think would have performance implications. If nothing else in file size.

In the end, remember that premature optimization is the root of all evil. Furthermore, there are other things that will have greater effect on speed (minification, static domain, etc) than rule order. Not to mention there is something to be said for code readability.