This makes sense:
Wrap everything in your CSS reset with a
@layerrule.When you place any styles inside a layer, these styles automatically have lower priority compared to all unlayered styles on the page. Think of it like an
!unimportantblock. You don’t need to worry about specificity or order of stylesheets at all.
I like the approach here: logical properties and sensible default type and spacing.
This is a very handy piece of work by Rich:
The idea is to set sensible typographic defaults for use on prose (a column of text), making particular use of the font features provided by OpenType. The main principle is that it can be used as starting point for all projects, so doesn’t include design-specific aspects such as font choice, type scale or layout (including how you might like to set the line-length).
A solid update to Andy’s four-years old CSS reset. Best of all, every single line comes with an explanation. So if you don’t like the reasoning, don’t use that line.
Prompted by my recent post about using native button elements, Trys puts forward a simple explanation for why someone would choose to use a div instead.
The one common feature between every codebase I’ve encountered on that doesn’t use
buttons well, is a bad CSS reset. Developers try to use abutton, and find that it still looks like a native browser button, so they grab a plain old, blank canvasdiv, and build from there.
Occam’s Razor makes Trys’s explanation the most likely one.
This CSS reset is pleasantly minimalist and a lot of thought has gone into each step. The bit about calculating line height is very intriguing!
Monica shares the little snippet of handy CSS she uses at the start of any project.
Some very smart ideas in here for resetting default browser styles, like only resetting lists that have classes applied to them:
ul[class],
ol[class] {
padding: 0;
}
I select only lists that do have a
classattribute because if a plain ol’<ul>or<ol>gets used, I want it to look like a list. A lot of resets, including my previous ones, aggressively remove that.
This is a really interesting approach that isn’t quite a CSS reset or a normalisation. Instead, it’s an experiment to reimagine what a default browser stylesheet would be like if it were created today, without concerns about backwards compatibility:
Applies basic styling to form elements and controls, getting you started with custom styling. We want to find the balance between providing a base for implementing a custom design, and allowing OS-level control over how form inputs work (like how a number pad works on iOS).
Provides a very lightweight starter file, with generic visual styling that you will want to replace. This isn’t as robust or opinionated as a starter-theme or framework. We’ve leaned toward specifying less, so you have less to override. (We haven’t defined any font families, for example.)
You can contribute by adding issues.
This crystallises something I’ve been thinking about for a while. There’s a fundamental philosophical idea underpinning CSS reset or normalise boilerplate that feels at odds with the belief that it’s perfectly fine for websites to look different in different browsers and devices.
Barebones templates for HTML5 documents. It needs a bit of work but it's a nifty idea.
Pulling together a bunch of CSS tricks from a range of sources: reseting, baseline typography and grids (fixed width, unfortunately).