My Drupal Blog

Up until yesterday I wouldn't have given much thought to your choice to zero out the padding and margins--but then I read a couple of posts on Eric Meyer's blog about why this is a bad thing to do. The short version is that using the universal selector as you have suggested does indeed reset the padding and margins for *everything*--including form elements. Meyer explains here (http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/15/) why that's a bad idea. In a related post, he also explains--and documents--those elements he does reset: http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/. It's worth reading through the post and comments to see how he handles it as well as his rationale.

Laurence--glad you included the link to the initial post by Meyer--should have done that myself.

The big idea that I take away from Meyer's discussion of the reset rules is that beyond creating a baseline for all browsers, resetting the rules forces him to think about every element of the page and why he is styling it as he does. To put it another way, the reset encourages intentional design choices, and I think that's a good thing.

You noted in your post on stripping down the page template file to its skeleton (I think that's the one) that it's good to understand how the various elements work together up front and to solve design problems up front, rather than implementing code and then hoping you can figure out where the kinks and quirks are coming from. Another benefit of some sort of reset rules is that it helps with the problem solving.

Finally, Meyer himself notes that his rules are his--how he would create a baseline for his designs, and he encourages his readers to create their own--and to know why they are making the choices they make.