(this was originally going to be a question, but rubber ducking this solved my problem. I thought I'd post it anyway to help future readers, since I pretty much finished writing it).
Consider a report with some buttons that will highlight the row when clicked.
https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=88776:3
(swesley/otn/forum)
I've done this using dynamic action on click of anchor in report
$(this.triggeringElement).closest('tr').find('td').addClass('master');
Where the class is defined
.master,.master:hover { background-color: lightblue !important;}
For interactive reports there is no problem, it works as desired.
For classic reports the important background colour in vita.css overrides my class when the mouse hovers the record. I tried setting the existing class to inherit, to find the same suggestion already for theme 24, but it doesn't solve the problem
I thought it would be nice to have a template option to disable row highlighting, since it's seems to be a common task. Turns out the option exists already under the classic report attributes and I initially missed it.
Another win for the APEX 5 dev team.