Question

I’ve been trying to build a web site and I was using a CSS Reset Stylesheet to aid in cross-browser compatability. However, now that I am looking at the results in Firebug, it looks like all CSS Resets do is spend a lot of wasted time traversing up the DOM. For instance, a simple line of code like:

<div><span><p>...</p></span></div>

Will inherit a bunch of wasted styles from p, span, div, body, and html which will probably be overwritten by a class or id anyways. And for many of the scenarios I can think of, a simple inheritance from body{} would suffice. This seems really inefficient to me.

My real question is, would it be better practice if I just set:

* {margin:0; padding:0; border:0;} and maybe body {font-size:62.5%}

Or is that code equally inefficient? At this point, those two CSS rules seem to be the only useful part of a reset stylesheet.

Answer 1

To quote Eric Meyers about his Reset style sheet.

That’s much of the point here: that
this is not a case of “everyone must
use these styles in a certain way
without alteration”. Nor am I saying
that everyone must use them or else be
cast into darkness. Remember before
that I termed these “my take on the
topic of reset styles” (emphasis
added). Your take may be subtly or
greatly different. Think of these as a
starting point for creating your own
defaults, in addition to being a way
to illuminate the nature of browser
defaults. Simply the act of taking
those defaults into consideration and
thinking about them closely puts you
ahead of 99% of your peers. I do think
that reset styles are quite useful;
otherwise, I wouldn’t have written
about them here, and certainly not to
the extent that I have. My hope is
that people will use them as a launch
pad for their own resets and for
deeper thinking about styling and
browsers.

If you discover that a simpler reset style sheet works best for you then I really can’t disagree with you. I think you have identified the parts that really matter for layout purposes, and if that is all you are looking for, you don’t have to push it any farther.