cybernetics/destyle.css

Opinionated reset stylesheet that provides a clean styling slate for your project.

destyle.css

Opinionated reset stylesheet that provides a clean slate for styling your html.

What it does

• Ensures consistency across browsers (thanks normalize.css)
• Resets spacing (margin & padding)
• Resets font-size and line-height
• Prevents the necessity of reseting (most) user agent styles
• Prevents style inspector bloat by only targeting what is necessary
• Contributes to the separation of presentation and semantics
• Works well with all kind of styling approaches, atomic libraries like tachyons, component based styling like css-in-js in React, good 'ol css, ...

Why?

Eric Meyer's reset resets properties on elements that do not need it, are unused or even deprecated, this creates bloat in the browser's style inspector which makes developing and debugging less efficient. Normalize.css makes elements look consistent across browsers and it does it well, but it does not remove the user agent's assumptions about how things look. Destyle.css targets both reseting & normalization.

Installation

$ npm install --save destyle.css

Download: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nicolas-cusan/destyle.css/master/destyle.css

Browser support

• Chrome
• Edge
• Firefox ESR+
• Internet Explorer 10+
• Safari 8+
• Opera

Usage

Include destyle.css in the head of your HTML file before your main stylesheet.

Recommended

Add your base font and color styles to the body element in your stylesheet, all other elements will inherit the style from the body.

/* app.css */

body {
  color: #333;
  font: 16px/1.4 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif;
}

It is discouraged to define styles for raw html tags apart from body and html, use classes (or any other selectors / system) for styling.

If you need to create styles for tags generated by a CMS or markdown wrap them in a class (e.g. .type).

.type h1 {
  \* styles *\
}

.type h2 {
  \* styles *\
}

<div class="type">{{ generatedMarkup }}</div>

Example

An h1 might need to be bold & large in some context (at the top of a text page) but might be small and inconspicuous in others (on a settings page in an app).

Creating two different styles for h1 is made easy as only the styles you need to get the desired visual results have to be applied without the need to overwrite default styles while maintaining semantics.

/* No reseting of the user agent styles necessary,
 * just take care of making things look how you want to. */

/* Bold, large title */
.main-title {
  font-size: 3em;
  margin-bottom: 20px;
  font-weight: bold;
}

/* Just some padding and gray color, otheriwse looks like normal text */
.secondary-title {
  color: gray;
  padding: 10px;
}

<!-- article.html -->
<h1 class="main-title">Large title</h1>

<!-- profile.html -->
<h1 class="secondary-title">Small title</h1>

<!-- Looks the same as `h1.secondary-title` -->
<p class="secondary-title">Other small title</p>

How to create the styles is up to the author, it can be by creating classes, compose style using functional classes, styling inside a react component, etc. In any case the author always gets a clean slate for styling each element and it is up to him/her to reuse the styles or start from scratch for every instance.

Rules & Caveats

• The box model is reset to border-box using the * selector
• button and input are also reset (as much as possible)
• code, pre, kbd, samp maintain a monospaced font-family
• hr is set to be a solid 1px line that inherits its color from its parent's text color
• Inline elements that carry style (b, i, strong, etc.) are not reset.
• textarea maintains its default height.
• canvas and iframe maintain their default width and height.
• select is reset using appearance: none which is not cross-browser, be advised when styling custom selects. You can find a good guide here
• HTML5 inputs and elements like range, color, meter and progress are not reset.

Credits

This project is heavily inspired by normalize.css and the original reset by Eric Meyer. The source of the test page is from html5-test-page.