CSS CSS CSS

Reset, And Starting From Scratch

August 18, 2008 @ 8:12 am

In college I took 2D and 3D design courses as part of the digital graphics minor I was completing. The mechanics of art have always come easy to me but I just grew out of wanting to do it a long time ago. I would start with what I thought was a good idea but by the end of the project I was just ready to move on to the next. That’s exactly how I am with CSS.

Professionally I’ve mostly worked on projects where the number of unskilled CSS fingers touching the stylesheets were way too many and the hours of development were far too few. This doesn’t make for a good final set of styles for the most part and I had to give up crawling through the SVN logs to make sure nobody did anything too crazy when I wasn’t watching.

When I started at the company I currently do most of my work for the CSS was terrible. I started a new stylesheet and slowly migrated sections of the site over to it until most of the major stuff was converted or had been newly developed. But within 6 months the style sheet was starting to get nasty. Development had changed direction so many times that very few of the global styles were global and instead there were a few sections of code that set defaults and then dozens of exceptions for all the different sections of the site. That’s no good.

Recently I started a new stylesheet and boy has that made me happy. Many of the page specific styles for layout were able to be copied over line by line. It was the refactoring of the site wide styles that made me feel so much better. It was exactly like in my art classes. Like putting down your stupid charcoal pencil for a moment and just turning to over to a brand new sheet of paper and then breathing a sigh of sweet relief.

On the subject of starting from scratch is Eric Meyer’s reset CSS. From the beginning I’ve been uneasy with the idea of a reset CSS document. Over at Nettuts.com there’s an article about CSS reset that I like a bit more. It deals with not reseting everything but instead customizing your reset. This is more the way I do it. Over time you get a feel for which elements are going to give you trouble in different browsers and you start to learn to avoid certain situations automatically.

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