web non-sense : blog on web design, photography, music and jeeps

From No CSS Reset by Jonathan Snook:

“The problem I’ve had with these resets is that I then find myself declaring much more than I ever needed to just to get browsers back to rendering things the way I want. As it turns out, I’m perfectly happy with how a number of elements render by default. I like lists to have bullets and strong elements to have bolded text.”

I echo that declaration. I too used to start my stylesheet with the famous

* { margin: 0; padding: 0; }

The I found that I was putting back the same formatting that was already set by default on most of the elements.

As for building a base CSS stylesheet, I do have one but it mostly only contains the main separations for a site like #header, #content, etc…

A four-part series by Cameron Moll

“Throughout the duration of this series, we’ll be speaking extensively about markup — XHTML, CSS, and a little scripting. Marking up a website is akin to speaking Spanish. There’s more than one way say something, and there’s certainly more than one way to code something.”

Here are a few tips I’ve gathered up to help you write a more efficient or clutter-free CSS.

No units for Zero values

.mybox {
    margin-top: 0px;
}

This I’ve seen oh so many times! Sure the CSS validator won’t give you an error because of it but when you think about it, why put units? 0 is still 0 in px, pt, em, %, etc…
(more…)