This keeps at least a basic outline on links for when people forgot to add them in, as was the case when building sites with your previous reset.

It’s a fuzzy line between resetting everything to a consistent cross browser level and giving developers the nudge they need to make sure they don’t miss important styles out.

- Outlines on other elements apparently are no problem right now. If they do appear, it may be better anyway to leave them alone by default, much like with links right now.
- Option 2 also, in contrast to the other options, simplifies the stylesheet a bit, which is always a good thing.

While I believe you have an excellent point about how differently each browser handles focus styles, I still don’t find any of those differences to be “disruptive” as was/is the case with the differences in padding, margins and other bits that vendors used in their default styles.

In the case where focus styles have not been updated to align with other design elements, the default handling has a familiar feel to it for the user of that particular browser. In fact, it has been that issue that has me considering whether it is beneficial to alter the default focus styles at all. But, I believe that is a discussion unto itself, not best served here. Not to mention, I can also argue what’s good about changing those styles to align with the design. So, pardon my split decision on that one.

Regardless, none of those varied styles for focus have a strong negative impact on layout, which I believe has been the greatest strength of the reset stylesheet.

Just my opinion, of course.

Future-proofing is noble and all, but you can’t protect against every possibility. And the current reset doesn’t do that anyway – what if a browser decides that all paragraphs should have blue text by default?

(thanks Eric for updating the stylesheet to tackle that problem)

If form elements are to be avoided, a is a special case, and outline only affects those two sets then there’s no reason to reset the outline at all. Hence Option 2.

Though option two looks good, too. That could be equally as helpful, and on the matter of focusable elements turning up in the future, you’ve changed the reset before, wouldn’t be that big of a deal to do it again. ;)

The goal of a reset stylesheet is to reduce browser inconsistencies in things like default line heights, margins and font sizes of headings, and so on.

I think you should clarify the “and so on” because that will really point us in the direction you’re expecting this to go. The list of items you wrote out here all impact the layout of a page and the flow of the text. The conservative interpretation here is that CSS Reset was meant to prevent the trainwreckedness of page layouts that were caused by differing default renderings.

However you’ve included outline, background, and text-decoration attributes, each of which don’t have an impact on page layout. So you were thinking somewhat beyond just page layout/element positioning. But how far? I would say you should have a specific vision for what CSS Reset should be doing for these three attributes.

I can make the argument that resetting background is a good move for consistent rendering of initial page layouts, so I would add that to your first sentence on the CSS Reset page and keep it in the CSS Reset code.

I cannot make a good argument for resetting INS/DEL’s text-decoration since I’ve never used those in a production environment. I have nearly always removed these from my use of your code.

I cannot make a good argument for resetting outline because I’ve never seen the variation in outline rendering cause problems in my pages. (Nor anyone else’s for that matter.) This is why I voted for Option 2 previously.

And here we have the crux of the issue: is CSS Reset meant to [A] fix the problem of seriously broken layouts due to inconsistent browser defaults or [B] is it meant to ‘clean slate’ all aspects of browser rendering?

I hope you think that [A] is the better way to go here, because [B] implies that the Web Designer knows the very best way to override the local needs of a browser without knowing the context of the user (keyboard or no, mouse/trackball or no, touchscreen or no, etc.).

TL/DR: Get rid of the Outline attribute because it’s not a problem that needs fixing.

Being that CSS reset should be a general solution, those particular cases you have to handle by hand each time, when opting for #3, sounds like an ostricho-camel funny to me.

Even more, opting #2 means maintaining accesability, which was the point, to start with.