Outline and ring colors fallback should prefer --border-color before --color

[aaryan610]

In Tailwind CSS v4, outline-color falls back to --color when --outline-color is not defined. This proposal suggests inserting --border-color into the fallback chain.

Current Behavior

--outline-color → --color → currentColor

Proposed Behavior

--outline-color → --border-color → --color → currentColor

Motivation

Outlines are commonly used to visually reinforce borders (focus states, hover states, form controls). Falling back to text color leads to unexpected results and requires additional utilities to correct.

Benefits

1. More intuitive defaults
   2.Better visual consistency
2. Fewer explicit outline-* utilities required

Open Question

Was skipping --border-color an intentional design decision? If so, clarifying the rationale would be helpful. 🙌

[rozsazoltan]

I don't find this very logical. If I don't want to use the border color as the outline color, I have no way to prevent it - except by overriding it, which would be unexpected behavior.

A much more effective approach would be to implement color copying, and then, if needed, copy all border-color values into the outline-color as well: #18702