How do I detect the inherited background-color of an element using jQuery/JS?

Question

Using jQuery (or just JavaScript), how do I detect the inherited background-color of an element?

For example:

Answer 1

#target has no background color to read because background-color is not inherited.

you could write some javascript that keeps climbing up the DOM tree to search for a background-color declaration until it finds one., but there's no guarantee that that will get you the background color of an element that actually contains your #target.

btw. the css() method gets computed styles, so its giving you the correct reading.