makeup-style in-depth: Introduction

Coding CSS a decade ago, a CSS-reset was normally used, and an utter annoyance. Especially for those new to web development. Then normalize.css became popular, thank god, and elements would more or less keep their intended default styles, just be somewhat styled to be similar across browsers. By default HTML elements made visually semantic sense again.

By browser default, an HTML element’s default style does actually show the semantic meaning of that element. Yes that style is simple by default, but links display as links, lists as lists, and so on. As opposed to a CSS reset, Normalize.css kept the semantic visuals and only normalized default styling so they looked similar between browsers. Most agree on that being a good thing, so many that there are quite a lot of projects in the same spirit as normalize.css: modern-normalize, CSS Remedy, sanitize.css, and probably others. Some of these does more that normalizing, they correct and improve browser default CSS in ways developers expects.

Why Correct and Improve Default CSS Again?

Neither of the former are actively maintained at the moment (except for Sindre Sorhus’ modern-normalize). CSS rules that fixes default CSS quickly becomes obsolete with the speed browsers implements CSS language features (and not all libraries have been explicit on which of their rules are polyfill—another point to improve).

More importantly, how they corrects and improves browser default styling can be further corrected and improved, not necessarily by more code, but by fixing the problem in a minimal way—sometimes using newer properties—so elements work and can be consistently styled.

Opportunities for improving the developer experience should be embraced where possible and simple to do so.