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windows2020

A friend recently started practicing front-end development and showed me something they put together. Included was a 200+ line CSS 'reset' file. It made up most of their CSS but they weren't able to explain what the different parts of it did or why they were needed. In fact, most of it wasn't applicable (it styled elements that didn't exist) or needed (it defined styles that were always overridden later on). I suggested they remove the file piece by piece to gain a better understanding of CSS.

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I don’t think this is good advice. The point of a reset file is to reset everything. You don’t want to add an element later and have that element contain random default styles. Is understand how each line of a dependency works really important?

CSS resets have been contentious as long as they’ve existed, but they’re especially contentious now because they’re mostly superfluous (see the article) and tend to override things in ways that harm usability and accessibility.

If you’re using one now, yeah it’s probably a good idea to understand what it’s actually doing, rule by rule.

Yes, understanding each line is critical. I run a CMS that houses millions legal documents for thousands of organizations. A prior dev put in a reset that took away padding from P tags, so we have all these documents that have been built of the years with no layout difference between a soft return and a hard return. Which means they all have extra P tags between each actual paragraph, and at this point we can't even change our CSS without instigating reformatting of millions of documents. And legal authors do not like that one bit. So it stays because our data is more important than our CSS. But it also annoys.

I pointed this out to them all when I first joined, and they said, "But CSS resets are good ideas."

So yes - please take the time to understand what your CSS does, especially when working with tags that format text, as it can have subtle (and not so subtle) impacts on data created in a UI with unwise CSS reset choices.

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