CSS Tip #1: Resetting Your Styles with CSS Reset. This is the first part of a series of articles that will discuss a particular CSS best practice or tip. I’ll be covering a mixture of topics that deals with CSS best practices, performance optimization, and tips and tricks to improve your workflow. Today we’ll be covering the topic of resetting your styles. Resetting your styles, commonly referred to as CSS Reset or Reset CSS is the process of resetting (or more accurately – setting) the styles of all elements to a baseline value so that you avoid cross-browser differences due to their built-in default style settings.
By resetting your styles, you avoid defaulting to the browser’s built-in styles, which differs from browser to browser. CSS Reset avoids browser inconsistencies For example, say you use an anchor tag <a> in your HTML document. A simple example Example 1: How paragraph tags are rendered by default. By default, these spaces don’t exist in Internet Explorer. So which browser is right, Firefox or IE? A reset to where it all started… CSS Basics: 5 things to do after you add reset.css | Wren Lanier. When developing a web site, using a reset.css stylesheet is one of the best ways to achieve cross-browser consistency. As Eric Meyer explains, “The goal of a reset stylesheet is to reduce browser inconsistencies in things like default line heights, margins and font sizes of headings, and so on.”
If you’re not familiar with reset stylesheets, you can read all about them here and here. Reset stylesheets have become increasingly common in the last few years as they’ve found their way into frameworks like Blueprint and popular WordPress themes. Yet some designers still don’t understand the purpose of reset.css, or know that using one means several common HTML elements will need to be restyled. Too often, the use of reset.css results in strange behavior from infrequently-used HTML elements, like bulleted lists. Below are 5 things you absolutely need to do whenever you use a reset.css stylesheet. 1. A reset stylesheet normalizes h1-h6 and removes the padding from p tags. 2. 3. 4. 5. CSS Reset. Note: The files "reset.css" and "reset-context.css" are deprecated, use "cssreset.css" and "cssreset-context.css" instead.
The foundational CSS Reset removes the inconsistent styling of HTML elements provided by browsers. This creates a dependably flat foundation to build upon. With CSS Reset loaded, write explicit CSS your project needs. Note: CSS Base can complement CSS Reset by applying a style foundation for common HTML elements that is consistent for our browser baseline. Getting Started Include Dependencies To use CSS Reset, include the following source file in your web page: Global vs. YUI's CSS resources apply rules to HTML elements directly (using type selectors). Here is how to include the contextual version of CSS Reset: Using CSS Reset Using CSS Reset Globally CSS Reset is easy to use.
Here is an example page showing HTML elements once CSS Reset has been included in the page globally. Using CSS Reset Contextually. Eric/tools/css/reset/reset.css. CSS Tools: Reset CSS. The goal of a reset stylesheet is to reduce browser inconsistencies in things like default line heights, margins and font sizes of headings, and so on. The general reasoning behind this was discussed in a May 2007 post, if you're interested. Reset styles quite often appear in CSS frameworks, and the original "meyerweb reset" found its way into Blueprint, among others. The reset styles given here are intentionally very generic.
There isn't any default color or background set for the body element, for example. I don't particularly recommend that you just use this in its unaltered state in your own projects. It should be tweaked, edited, extended, and otherwise tuned to match your specific reset baseline. In other words, this is a starting point, not a self-contained black box of no-touchiness. If you want to use my reset styles, then feel free! Previous Versions v1.0 (200802) Acknowledgments Thanks to Paul Chaplin for the blockquote / q rules.
Normalize.css: Make browsers render all elements more consistently. CSS Tools: Reset CSS.