Comments on: Fractionally Restoring html.css

By: The History of CSS Resets

The History of CSS Resets — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 12:02:39 +0000

[...] Çelik’s work as a jumping-off point for his first attempt at a global reset, as well as a follow-up almost immediately thereafter. In the same conversation I had, Çelik said, "About a week and [...]

By: rationell.co.uk » Internet

rationell.co.uk » Internet — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 17:50:33 +0000

[...]

April 8, 2006

Internet

HTMLSpecial Characters Article about browsers default style sheets by Eric Meye [...]

By: Iwan Groeneveld

Iwan Groeneveld — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 16:12:15 +0000

As an additional alternative (alliteration ahoy) to having two Firefox installs, you may also want to consider Opera. It offers great flexibility when it comes to custom user stylesheets and applying them on the fly with a mere button toggle. It deals with any amount of custom CSS files easily, making it an excellent tool for this kind of job.

By: Peter Kasting

Peter Kasting — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 01:39:29 +0000

Hooray for me :(. As I can't edit posts, I should note that the above links should be mozillazine and Google News... as if people didn't know and couldn't figure that out.

By: Peter Kasting

Peter Kasting — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 01:37:42 +0000

As Grauw posts above, one "default" I noticed lots of web designers relying on this past week was that the browser would use black (dark) text on a white (light) background. When I switched my color scheme to light-on-dark and told my browser to "use system colors" by default (but of course respect overrides given by the page), I noticed dozens of sites doing things like setting a white or off-white background, and not setting a text color. In fact, mozillazine's site does this, as well as Google News, many other major news sites, tons of blogs, etc.

By: Joey

Joey — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 00:54:43 +0000

Hey Eric, while your on the subject of firefox, any reason you don’t have a Firefox button? You know you want one. Haha… c’mon, join the crowd and convince the 5% of the people that visit here to use Firefox (who are probably at a place where they cannot get Firefox, which is understood- lol)

By: Laurens Holst

Laurens Holst — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 23:50:21 +0000

Nice thought. Kind of the same thing as turning your background colour into a darkish colour and your foreground into a light one (white on dark red or black or something) and seeing how well it holds out. I did it on my own humble home not too long ago and it’s interesting… if you use the default browser background colour, you have to define colours in couples of both fore- and background colours otherwise the text will be unreadable. It will still not look very pretty (as I remarked in that thing on my site having my hands on rgba() colour settings would come in handy for that), but at least it’s readable and the user’s (as well as other style’s) default colour settings have been honoured.

I’ll give my site a treatment of this kind as well sometime, to see what happens. Let me give you a suggestion though: as opposed to having two Firefox installs, it might be easier to apply this behaviour in the userContent.css file. It depends, but if it’s processed later than that html.css file (which I think it is) it should work because the new rules will override the html.css rules. Basically we’re just talking about different default styles, and that’s what userContent.css is for.

~Grauw

By: Andrew Krespanis

Andrew Krespanis — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 22:35:20 +0000

Good stuff Eric, it’s important that designers learn not to rely on defaults. One technique I swear by is adding a global reset to padding and margins as the first declaration:
* { padding:0; margin:0; }

This not only ensures I’m not trusting browser defaults, but also makes my CSS far more reusable between projects.

By: Nico Edtinger

Nico Edtinger — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 20:45:42 +0000

For playing around with stylesheets you could also try editcss for Firefox. As long as it stays open the style sheet in the editcss sidebar is used and all changes show up immediately. Although I think you’ve to make all your styles !important to overrule html.css

b4n

By: Dave Marks

Dave Marks — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 20:21:41 +0000

Instead of running two copies Eric, how about writing a plugin that would disable/enable the intermal styles.

I suggested just this to Chris Pederick http://www.chrispederick.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=164 as it could quite easily pop under Disable > Disable Styles on the Web Develoer Toolbar.

Still awaiting a reply though – prehaps you could drop by that thread and add some weight :)