antanova: Code bits: reset / default stylesheet

Code bits: reset / default stylesheet

Browser inconsistencies are something that drives a sane web developer mad. For example, last week, I was trying to shoehorn a fairly simple-looking design into some html/css code, ready to be dynamicised (yes, I did just write dynamicised. Sorry.) Unfortunately, what happened, as always, was that Safari used a different line-height to everyone else, IE used a different heading size, and Firefox was absolutely perfect, because that’s what I was doing most of my testing with.

I come across this problem all the time, as you can probably imaging, and my solution is to have a base css file that I then modify and extend for every project. Doing that largely eliminates inconsistencies, or at least makes inconsistencies consistent project after project.

Eric Meyer’s ‘CSS reset’ stylesheet has been knocking around for some time, and is a useful resource to use or just to look at and understand why he’s done what he’s done. Anyway, he’s now given it a permanent home on his site, so there’s somewhere to check back for updates.

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/

Here it is in full…

/* v1.0 | 20080212 */

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
b, u, i, center,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  border: 0;
  outline: 0;
  font-size: 100%;
  vertical-align: baseline;
  background: transparent;
}
body {
  line-height: 1;
}
ol, ul {
  list-style: none;
}
blockquote, q {
  quotes: none;
}
blockquote:before, blockquote:after,
q:before, q:after {
  content: '';
  content: none;
}

/* remember to define focus styles! */
:focus {
  outline: 0;
}

/* remember to highlight inserts somehow! */
ins {
  text-decoration: none;
}
del {
  text-decoration: line-through;
}

/* tables still need 'cellspacing="0"' in the markup */
table {
  border-collapse: collapse;
  border-spacing: 0;
}

Labels: Code-bits, css