Question

In some articles that I’ve read, the use of * {margin:0; padding:0;} is discouraged as it would affect the web site’s performance. So I turned to a reset.css stylesheet.

But I’m wondering, how does it affect the performance?

Answer 1

The reasoning behind this was discussed in this Eric Meyer post.

This is why so many people zero out
their padding and margins on
everything by way of the universal
selector. That’s a good start, but it
does unfortunately mean that all
elements will have their padding and
margin zeroed, including form elements
like textareas and text inputs. In
some browsers, these styles will be
ignored. In others, there will be no
apparent effect. Still others might
have the look of their inputs altered.
Unfortunately, there’s just no way to
know, and it’s an area where things
are likely to change quite a bit over
the next few years.

So that’s why I don’t want to use the
universal selector, but instead
explicitly list out elements to be
reset. In this way, I don’t have to
worry about munging form elements. (I
really should write about the
weirdnesses inherent in form elements,
but that’s for another day.)

That said, the following chart from this Steve Souders post shows the difference in load times for a test page using universal selectors compared with a page using descendant selectors.