The Best CSS Reset Stylesheets

Reverting your CSS to baseline properties is essential for achieving control, predictability, and consistency in how browsers render your H

Reverting your CSS to baseline properties is essential for achieving control, predictability, and consistency in how browsers render your HTML elements. For a deeper understanding of CSS resets, refer to these articles:

The Evolution of CSS Resets

A Comprehensive Overview of CSS Resets

In terms of the most current stylesheet options for resetting your CSS, here are the leading choices: Eric Meyer’s Reset CSS — the stylesheet that has made CSS resets a staple. Reset CSS either nullifies a default CSS property by setting it to 0, or assigns a sensible value (e.g., on the element). Defining specific CSS property values can help reduce inconsistencies in how browsers render our HTML elements.Related:Eric Meyer’s Insights on CSS3 Note that Reset CSS was last updated in 2011. Many CSS reset stylesheets we’ll discuss have not been updated recently. Richard Clark’s reset stylesheet is a variation of Eric Meyer’s Reset CSS, tailored for modern HTML 5 elements. The HTML5 Reset Stylesheet also eliminates certain pseudo-class resets and employs attribute selectors to target the and elements, thereby narrowing the scope of their style rules.This minimalist CSS reset, by Vladimir Carrer, contains only four CSS style rules. It targets only the most frequently-used HTML elements — those you’re likely to use in your web development projects. Explore CSS Mini Reset on GitHub.This stylesheet is part of the HTML5 Reset boilerplate, inspired by three open-source projects: Reset CSS, HTML5 Reset Stylesheet, and HTML 5 Boilerplate. It’s robust and has specific style rules for the and pseudo-classes, as well as sets the property to , which other options do not. Marx is a boilerplate stylesheet suitable for small website development projects. For simple websites, like single-page sites, you may not need a large front-end framework like Bootstrap, and Marx can be a viable alternative.These two CSS reset stylesheets are designed for specific purposes:This is a baseline CSS reset for web typography, aimed at text-heavy sites and web pages like blogs and news sites. Note that Typeset.css is effective only on HTML elements that are children of an element with a class of .Implementing Typeset.css might involve something like: Cleanslate is an aggressive CSS reset designed for content distributed on other websites, where style rule control is limited. Cleanslate employs an universal declaration on all property values to force browsers not to follow normal cascading and CSS specificity rules, giving you a better chance of overriding the style rules of third-party websites.Modern browsers are adept at setting appropriate default styles and adhering to modern standards and best practices. Default styles are now more predictable and consistent. Thus, instead of resetting all default browser styles, we can focus on specific HTML elements and CSS properties that render unevenly across browsers, preserving other useful browser defaults.This is the core concept behind CSS normalization. Essentially, we let the browser or normalization stylesheet define style rules for unstyled HTML elements. This ensures predictable and consistent rendering across browsers, even if we forget or fail to assign a style rule to an element.A key advantage of CSS normalization is that it maintains our stylesheets as DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). We don’t reset HTML element property values to 0, only to overwrite them with another style rule later in the cascade. Related:Should You Reset Your CSS? Here are the top two CSS normalization stylesheets to consider: Normalize.css, a widely-used CSS normalization stylesheet, is employed by major sites like Twitter and GitHub, and is a dependency in large open-source projects like Bootstrap and HTML5 Boilerplate.Normalize.css is the pioneering stylesheet in this category. sanitize.css, authored by Jonathan Neal, the co-author of Normalize.css, provides style rules to ensure consistent rendering of HTML elements across different browsers. This normalization stylesheet also comes with a Sass version, which is appreciated by many developers.