CSS inheritance and overriding it

Question

I'm new to CSS. Ive created a Drupal site and playing with the theme.

I have some breadcrumb stuff that I would like to theme. If I go into Firebug and turn off the CSS properties

background
border-color
border-style

in the below code

.breadcrumbs .inner {
    background: none repeat scroll 0 0 #EFEFEF;
    border-color: #929292 #E2E2E2 #FFFFFF;
    border-style: solid;
    border-width: 1px;
    color: #8E8E8E;
}

I get the text looking exactly how I want it.

If I now go into my style.css which is inheriting the code and post

.breadcrumbs .inner {
    border-width: 1px;
    color: #8E8E8E;
}

The formatting I don't want is retained. If I specify .breadcrumbs .inner in the style.css does that not set it up again and override what was specified higher up the cascade?

If that is not the case how do I stop the inheritance without changing the other style sheet?

Thanks,

Andrew

Additional Info

Here is what I have at the moment

This is what I want to have

Answer 1

If for example you have these css attached to your html document

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/default.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/posts.css">

if you have the same class say .color defined in the both default.css and posts.css files, you would imagine that that last css file will be used, but it can be ignored if you write it like so:

// default.css
.color {
   color: blue !important;
}

// posts.css
.color {
   color: green;
}
// In this example the colour would be blue.

Using !important on inherited style forces inherited style to be used, if you want to override the inherited style then you can simply add !important to post.css

// default.css
.color {
   color: blue !important;
}

// posts.css
.color {
   color: green !important;
}
// In this example the colour would be green.

Now both are viewed as important and the last one will be used.

Answer 2

If you specify the CSS styles for same classes twice the resulting style is a union of the attributes defined in both classes. To remove the previous styles you have to redefine the attributes.