How to overwrite styles with CSS?

Question

I have a large number of older html documents (I use Dreamweaver CS3 Premium) that were originally built using "regular" styles. I have tried to overwrite these old styles with CSS but this doesn't work. I first delete the old styles, attach the CSS and then apply the new CSS style, but artifacts of the old style remain, such as text colour, background colour, even font size. This has become a major time problem as I have to undo each element of a style to an item before I can successfully apply the new CSS. As I have over a hundred of these files to update, this process is costing me an enormous amount of time. Surely there must be a better way to apply new styles. Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

I’ll try to explain this problem again. The old HTML document has, for example:
<style>
    .h1blue
    .h2blue
    .body
    .footer
So .h1blue is “Arial, Helvetica etc,” size 16 pixels, font weight bold, color #000066.
I first delete this set of styles and then attach a new CSS:
ALPHA 210 new.css
    .body [Arial, Helvetica, etc.; size 12 points, line height 16 pts]
    .head1Brown [Times etc; size 18 points, font weight bold, color #663300]
When I apply .head1Brown, for example, the result is Arial 18 points rather than Times, and color #000066 (blue) rather than #663300 (brown). This means that I have to undo the font info (back to default), undo the color (to black), then reapply the style. Sometimes I have to do this 2 times or more for it to take.