Still No CSS Reset

It was interesting to read Chris Coyier’s recent post about Andy Bell’s recent post. It made me think of my personal projects and remembering that I didn’t use a reset for any of them.

Well, sort of.

The only thing that I consistently have across all of my projects is body { margin:0; }. I say sort of because this doesn’t stand alone as part of a “reset”—it sits with all of the other body declarations.

I couldn’t remember if I had written anything on CSS resets before and sure enough, back in 2008, I wrote about the rise of CSS resets and why I chose not to use one. Here we are 15 years later and my opinion really hasn’t changed. Adding the styles when I need them has helped keep my files smaller and easier to inspect.

To expand on that last point, one of my frustrations with using the browser inspector tools over the years has been seeing CSS resets add a lot of unnecessary clutter, showing struck-out property after struck-out property while I try to figure out what is being applied and from where.

So, yeah… still no CSS reset for me.