CSS Tip: Resetting Your Styles with CSS Reset

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. Usually, browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox will render it as blue and underlined.

But five years from now, someone decides to release a new browser (let’s call it UltraBrowser) and they decide that they don’t like blue, underlined links – so instead they set the default style of <a> tags to red and boldfaced. If you always set a baseline value for your <a> elements, then you’re guaranteed that it will always be the same, regardless of what UltraBrowser thinks <a> elements should look like.


A simple example

Example 1: How paragraph tags are rendered by default.

In Example 1, I’ve placed three unstyled paragraphs <p> inside a container <div> (I gave the container div a blue background and orange border to highlight the difference).

By default, in Firefox, you’ll see that there’s a space in between the top of the first paragraph and the top of the container div, and a space between the bottom of the last paragraph and the bottom of the container div.

By default, these spaces don’t exist in Internet Explorer.

So which browser is right, Firefox or IE? It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the spacing in between your paragraphs and other elements will look dissimilar if you don’t set a style for a paragraph’s margin and padding.

Of course that’s a rather simplified example. In practice, CSS Reset is important in removing inconsistent margins, paddings, line-heights, and other attributes that can cause your web pages to look differently across various browsers.

So that’s the basic theory of resetting your styles which just means you set your style rules for all elements to avoid having the browser do it for you.

The below CSS Reset code has been taken from HTML5Doctor. It’s recommended to use a CSS reset for consistency.

/* 
html5doctor.com Reset Stylesheet
v1.6.1
Last Updated: 2010-09-17
Author: Richard Clark - http://richclarkdesign.com 
Twitter: @rich_clark
*/

html, body, div, span, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
abbr, address, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, img, ins, kbd, q, samp,
small, strong, sub, sup, var,
b, i,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td,
article, aside, canvas, details, figcaption, figure, 
footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, section, summary,
time, mark, audio, video {
    margin:0;
    padding:0;
    border:0;
    outline:0;
    font-size:100%;
    vertical-align:baseline;
    background:transparent;
}

body {
    line-height:1;
}

article,aside,details,figcaption,figure,
footer,header,hgroup,menu,nav,section { 
 display:block;
}

nav ul {
    list-style:none;
}

blockquote, q {
    quotes:none;
}

blockquote:before, blockquote:after,
q:before, q:after {
    content:'';
    content:none;
}

a {
    margin:0;
    padding:0;
    font-size:100%;
    vertical-align:baseline;
    background:transparent;
}

/* change colours to suit your needs */
ins {
    background-color:#ff9;
    color:#000;
    text-decoration:none;
}

/* change colours to suit your needs */
mark {
    background-color:#ff9;
    color:#000; 
    font-style:italic;
    font-weight:bold;
}

del {
    text-decoration: line-through;
}

abbr[title], dfn[title] {
    border-bottom:1px dotted;
    cursor:help;
}

table {
    border-collapse:collapse;
    border-spacing:0;
}

/* change border colour to suit your needs */
hr {
    display:block;
    height:1px;
    border:0;   
    border-top:1px solid #cccccc;
    margin:1em 0;
    padding:0;
}

input, select {
    vertical-align:middle;
}

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