Explain the concept of cascading in the context of web development or programming.

Cascading is a principle where multiple rules or instructions are applied sequentially, and in case of conflicts, priorities determine the final behavior. In web development, this term is most often associated with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

In CSS, cascading means that if multiple styles are applied to an element, the browser chooses which style to use based on:

• Selector specificity (the more specific the selector, the higher the priority).
• Style source (for example, inline styles have higher priority than external files).
• Declaration order (later rules can override earlier ones).

Example:

p { color: blue; } /* base style */
.special { color: red; } /* more specific class */

If a paragraph has the class "special", the text color will be red, because the rule with the class has a higher priority.

In programming, cascading can also mean a chain of method calls, where each method returns an object, allowing the next method to be called in sequence (method chaining). For example, in Java:

object.setName("John").setAge(30).setActive(true);

This simplifies and makes the code more readable.