Eric Meyer's reset.css

CSS Tools: Reset CSS
Eric's Archived Thoughts: Reset Reasoning

This is why so many people zero out their padding and margins on everything by way of the universal selector. That’s a good start, but it does unfortunately mean that all elements will have their padding and margin zeroed, including form elements like textareas and text inputs. In some browsers, these styles will be ignored. In others, there will be no apparent effect. Still others might have the look of their inputs altered. Unfortunately, there’s just no way to know, and it’s an area where things are likely to change quite a bit over the next few years.

So that's why I don't want to use the universal selector, but instead explicitly list out elements to be reset. In this way, I don't have to worry about munging form elements. (I really should write about the weirdnesses inherent in form elements, but that's for another day.

I want all this because I don’t want to take style effects for granted. This serves two purposes. First, it makes me think just that little bit harder about the semantics of my document. With the reset in place, I don’t pick strong because the design calls for boldfacing. Instead, I pick the right element—whether it’s strong or em or b or h3 or whatever—and then style it as needed.

/* v1.0 | 20080212 */

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
b, u, i, center,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
 margin: 0;
 padding: 0;
 border: 0;
 outline: 0;
 font-size: 100%;
 vertical-align: baseline;
 background: transparent;
}
body {
 line-height: 1;
}
ol, ul {
 list-style: none;
}
blockquote, q {
 quotes: none;
}
blockquote:before, blockquote:after,
q:before, q:after {
 content: '';
 content: none;
}

/* remember to define focus styles! */
:focus {
 outline: 0;
}

/* remember to highlight inserts somehow! */
ins {
 text-decoration: none;
}
del {
 text-decoration: line-through;
}

/* tables still need 'cellspacing="0"' in the markup */
table {
 border-collapse: collapse;
 border-spacing: 0;
}