This is a really great presentation, cognratulations!

I’ve written a more conclusive article defending reset style sheets on my web site.

I disagree – reset style sheets aren’t “bad” at all. None of the arguments nor alternatives really fix the consistency problem:

1. Listing a reset style sheet and then over-riding various definitions in your own stylesheet is a) part of the design principle and b) if you’re that worried you can merge the reset stylesheet and your own together – I usually have a development set of stylesheets and a final production version that I run through CSSTidy. This also debunks the load time argument.

2. The YUI reset stylesheet when CSSTidy-ed is under 3 kb. Un-optimized images, poorly structured (X)HTML and back-end code or even poorly written main stylesheets will add to the latency much more. I think this argument is fairly baseless and irrelevant.

3. YUI reset.css does not alter the outline property.

4. Just because there are a larger number of differing user agent stylesheets doesn’t necessarily mean reset stylesheets will need to be bigger – if one browser’s stylesheet defines the margin-bottom of a h1 element as 1em, and another 1.5, resetting it with margin: 0; fixes them all. Again I don’t see this much of an issue, even if it might mean that to accommodate for IE8, we may need to add another line or three to reset stylesheet.

Also note it is possible to deliver compressed CSS files to clients that support them.

On a final note, it really depends on the site you’re building. If you’re producing something for an upcoming Hollywood flick whereby without an over abundant use of Flash the site won’t get the approval stamp anyway – sure it’s relatively useless however when structuring large CMSs, intranets, news websites or the like it becomes highly useful.

Why “Reset” Style Sheets Are Bad
http://meiert.com/en/blog/20080419/reset-style-sheets-are...

a good one!

Brilliant! Loved it.