I do have a suggestion, though. To fix inconsistent behaviour in Gecko, I personally add li {-moz-float-edge:content-box;} to my own default stylesheet.

So take the reset and add the rules for ‘sup’ and ‘sub’ that you like best. Ditto list indentation, heading sizes, body background and foreground colors, and so on. Then use the resulting “reboot” or “baseline” styles—the reset plus what you added—to be your own personal starting point for your projects.

I’m not nearly the CSS expert that you are, but might I humbly suggest you add something like I describe here? :

http://striderweb.com/nerdaphernalia/2008/01/html-tip-cross-browser-sup-tags/

It fixes sup tags cross-browser. I suppose similar could be done for sub tags….

Please do not reset this message!

But my question then is what is the purpose of the declaration? Are there any known browser issues (minus NS4, which everyone filters out) with background inheritance that necessitate setting the background explicitly like this? If so, I would definitely keep it in there and put the IE fixes in my iehacks.css. If not, it seems kind of silly to declare it and have to undo it for IE (and on multiple classes and hover states) for no other good reason.

Thanks for your insights.

http://dgibson.net/blog/article.cfm/articleid=10/Meyers-CSS-Reset-v1-0-Doesnt-Play-Well-With-IE

Whilst I agree with you in principle, I am with the W3C on this, in that you’re having to remove the default, correct behaviour of standards compliant user-agents in order to achieve cross browser compliancy with regards to inferior browsers (IE7 and below).
I’m much more in favour for ignoring IE’s need for authors to include specific ampersands in the markup, and rather include a conditional IE style declaration that indicates to the users using IE that it is indeed a short quote – perhaps italic font style? I guess this could be seen as an element of progressive enhancement – default, correct behaviour for standards-compliant UA’s, and a fallback option for users of IE.

I guess at the end of the day, it comes down to what the author deems the most suitable solution for that partiular instance.

Just my two cents though.

As I’ve said before, I would no more rely on generated content to insert quotation marks than I would rely on ‘counter’-based automated list numbering in situations where it was important, like legal documents.

While Paul Chaplin most likely had IE6 in mind (and it’s inability to render the necessary delimiting quote marks), an author should not manually include the quote marks (in the form of ampersands or other) in the markup – as I’ve mentioned before, this is the sole responsibility of the user-agent.

I expanded on your ideas and made it my own. Check out my version of CSS Diagnostics. I included a lot of depreciated elements and attributes.

Thanks for the suggestion, Jason C. I”m reluctant to include it given that it will break validation, though I can be talked out of that reluctance. What inconsistent behavior are you fixing with that rule?

It’s hard to explain: I was using nested lists, and they would not float as expected (they worked fine in Safari, Opera, IE). Here’s the bug on bugzilla, and here is a very good illustration of the problem.

Not that transparent PNG’s don’t have major issues in IE7 anyway (especially in large backgrounds with contained floats), but thought this might be worth noting.

You suspect largely correctly, Jason G. Support for “border-spacing” is not quite as widespread as I”d like, so I left in the reminder. Over time, that will become unnecessary.

It is funny because I ran into this exact problem today while fixing some table CSS. IE 7 does not support border-spacing, however, when using border-collapse: collapse, the border spacing is irrelevant. I am unable to test this in IE 6 at the moment.

The worst table offender has to be the caption element though, I am convinced it is not possible to have identical and correct rendering across the major browsers.

Thanks for the suggestion, Jason C. I’m reluctant to include it given that it will break validation, though I can be talked out of that reluctance. What inconsistent behavior are you fixing with that rule?

I don’t think I’m going to put this into a version-control system (CVS, Subversion, etc.) other than the one in my head, Stephen. Sorry, but it just seems like massive overkill to me. Maybe I could wiki-ize it, but for that I’d have to set up a wiki. Again, feels like hitting a fly with a cruise missile. Maybe I’ll just run diffs and post them as needed? Dunno.

To everyone else: you’re welcome, and thanks for your interest and support!