could you also use "li.phone a" instead of ".contact-info li.phone a" as the selector? is there a standard way to know?

hey clayton nicholson , as a general rule of thumb you should only be as specific as needed.

as a basic example let's say you have a class phone and you only use it once - or whenever you use it it should look the same then in this case you only need to write styles like

.phone {
//your styles
}

no need to do something like this: (unfortunately I see this all over the place)

body .main .box .phone {
//styles for this
}

so going back to your original example it really depends on your structure. if you're about to style links inside the phone class differently, depending on other parent elements, you would go a level deeper. But if you only target the phone links in general than no need to be over-specific.

hope that helps and have a nice day ;)

I appreciate the answer. The code I referenced above was from one of the video tutorials. The instructor used:

.contact-info li.phone a {
// styles used
}

I didn't know if this same would also work:

li.phone a {
// styles used
}

the part of the selector that would change according to the lesson is the:

li.phone a {
// styles
}

as the other ones that would be styled differently would be:

li.mail a {
//styles
}

and:

li.twitter a {
// styles
}