Should i css reset

This article explores the ongoing debate on whether or not web designers and web developers should reset their CSS, sharing the thoughts and opinions of several web professionals. This is a three-part series of articles on the topic of CSS resets.

After discussing the rich and interesting history of CSS resets Part 1 and going over CSS reset stylesheet options Part 2 , we will now discuss the pros and cons of using reset stylesheets here in Part 3. The other concern of using the universal selector to reset your styles is the performance hit caused by using such an unspecific selector.

Web developer Florent Verschelde made a strong case for not using CSS resets, and instead, suggests that web designers should rely on well-crafted stylesheets to address cross-browser inconsistencies. Most designers and developers who believe that browser defaults cause most layout problems are wrong, according to Verschelde. Most of the actual inconsistencies crop up in the margins and padding of the body element, the margins and padding of lists, and heading font sizes.

Russ Weakley pointed out three major concerns with resetting your CSS :. In a interview by email, Weakley said that he was surprised when he found that designers and developers used his caveats as evidence that resets should not be used at all.

He said that CSS reset stylesheets should be viewed as another tool that designers could use, tweak, and modify to suit their own needs. In a slideshow presentation, Weakley cited the following code as being harmful to keyboard users:. When there is no visual representation of the active element such as a link , it makes web page navigation difficult for keyboard users because they are unable to see which HTML element they are currently on.

You would do your reset first, then override your styles as you progress in the stylesheet. Consider the rules in that link to fully understand how css will score the selectors. How are we doing? Please help us improve Stack Overflow. Take our short survey. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Should my css reset go before or after my css code? Ask Question.

Asked 7 years, 10 months ago. CSS resets can save you a lot of time matching a duplicate experience for each web browser. Just keep in mind these resets may not be necessary for every website and you should begin to understand the purpose of individual CSS libraries over repeated use. Resetting is a very aggressive approach that wipes out all browser default styles and lets you start from scratch. It imposes a homogenous visual style by flattening everything, all HTML tags will have no padding, no margin, no border, same font-size and same alignments.

These resets are intended to be used as a starting point, not a self-contained black box of no-touchiness. It should be tweaked, edited, extended, and otherwise tuned to match your specific reset baseline. Normalizing is a modern approach that retains useful default browser styles.

When an element has different default styles in different browsers, it aims to make those styles consistent and in line with modern standards when possible. We all have! Talking about overkilling does only mean we did not really look inside these reset style sheets and their comments….

Or even middles. To some extend it is a personal choice. Our goal was to find a way of styling that works for everybody at our company. We also tried some frameworks. I agree that a full-blown reset style sheet is nothing more than overkill for a 5-page brochureware site, but on a highly-designed, large-scale website, there is definitely a place for them. On April 23, , CEST , kontur said: We had this discussion lately at work also, and while, you can of course copy paste your reset. Some resets go lines of code to reset all the possible tag presets, but hey: as a webdesigner you should know what elements are tricky, and if you then actually use them on your site, style them like anything else.

Having these frameworks in your application allows you to do interesting things with your templates, allowing for programmability of markup with some layout already setup for you. Also when building applications and not a web site you usually have some build process in which you can minify and aggregate your CSS into a small numbers of files to reduce your bandwidth and http-request footprint; while still reserving the segmentation for development a huge plus!

Now we have 4 engines all agreeing on margins and Padding. They are Gecko 1. Since they all agree where margins and paddings are in the layout model, resets are no longer needed. As I have already said to you elsewhere, your just knocking down all margins and paddings and just building them back up with extra CSS.

Is this how you would build the foundation base for a house? For example, when several developers are collaborating on style sheets—often multiple style sheets per web page, CSS resets can be very useful. I find that they can help counter inconsistent and conflicting habits and coding styles. So, not everyone works in the same way, or in the same production environment. To style sheets with lines, or with several large background images?

So, if resets are bad, this one is too. Once again, Eric Meyer give some enlightments about this kind of statements in articles: Considered harmful. I would consider myself an now-old-begginer almost-expert CSS designer and I want to add some tools to my belt. It works wonders with all browsers acting somewhat the same. Maybe if you are doing simple layouts such as this then ok do not use them. I looked at your style sheets. I do not see the difference between one reset sheet and and a stylesheet for layout but your stylesheets?

The first bit looks like sections out of a reset sheet. Pretty simple layout here. So I am guessing a reset sheet then the styles after would be the same size.

Maybe you should concentrate your skills on Web Dev then opinions..