Question

This question is geared towards CSS3, I’ve been looking at a few boilerplate templates and guides and most of them declare a whole lot of attributes before even going into what you want to edit.

• Why is this so? Does declaring all of the usable attributes make the
  browser load faster or something?

• What are the benefits? Why not just use CSS3 “as is” (like just declaring what’s being used in the HTML section)?

• And if the underlying attribute changes in further editions, wouldn’t
  it mean you would have to constantly keep a check on deprecated
  attributes and keep declaring and changing attributes every once in a while?

Answer 1

HTML5Boilerplate contains a version of normalize.css. Rather than just reset everything to 0 (i.e. margins, padding etc) it has the minimum set of changes to ensure things have the same settings in all browsers. In their own words:

“Normalize.css is a customisable CSS file that makes browsers render
all elements more consistently and in line with modern standards. We
researched the differences between default browser styles in order to
precisely target only the styles that need normalizing.”

An example of a style used here is:

/*
 * 1. Correct text resizing oddly in IE6/7 when body font-size is set using em units
 * 2. Prevent iOS text size adjust on device orientation change, without disabling user zoom: h5bp.com/g
 */

html {
    font-size: 100%;
    -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;
    -ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;
}

This fixes some weirdness in older IE, as well as on iOS. This is the sort of thing that you’ll likely have a problem with, read loads, find a solution and add in eventually yourself. By using this set of defaults you can avoid a lot of weirdness.

As well as bugs, it includes things you’d likely want anyway:

nav ul,
nav ol {
    list-style: none;
    list-style-image: none;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
}

Using a ul in a nav is a common pattern, and you usually don’t want bullet points there. This sorts that for you.

In all, I’d recommend using your own custom version of their code – it will save you a lot of annoyance!