Rescinding the reset
For a while now I’ve been using some sort of ‘reset’ for my stylesheets. At first it was the global reset which involves zeroing out padding and margins on all elements by with the universal selector, e.g., * { margin: 0; padding: 0 }. Later I read about the problems this can cause for form elements and so have been using Eric Meyer’s Reset CSS.
But recently there’s been a few articles arguing against the need for reset styles and so I began questioning my own usage of them. I decided that for my next project I’d try starting from scratch without a reset stylesheet (which I previously would import into the main stylesheet).
Well, I’ve just completed one such project and was actually surprised to find that I didn’t even notice a difference! I had expected that it might take a little while to get used to having to explicitly declare rules that before would’ve been taken care of by the reset, but it turns out that I declare nearly everything explicitly anyway, so I wasn’t really doing any more typing than I usually would have. In fact, as those arguing against reset styles point out, I’m probably unnecessarily repeating rules by using a reset stylesheet.
Admittedly, the project I tested this on was just for a small website with not many different styles from page to page, so it’s possible that there would have been a more noticeable difference in my coding process if I had been working on a larger, more complicated project. So I’m going to hold fire on committing my reset styles to the recyle bin just yet, but will test the process out on a few more projects first.
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2 responses to Rescinding the reset. Add your own.
I agree!
Often many of the ‘normal’ behaviours of Html elements, such as a list (li), heading (h1) or paragraph (p) etc actually help with the layout of a website.
I.e. paragraphs have inbuilt margins, lists have bullet points as defaults.
Sometimes it takes as much effort re-styling the Html elements to bring them back to their defaults (when using reset.css).
I am not surprised by your findings. I personally use the global reset but ill have to try next website to do the same as you by not using it and using the default settings…
Interesting..