Why is making margin and padding 0 with '*' bad practice?

I wouldn't say reset is better because it's pretty much just as unnecessary. Using * is sort of like using a jackhammer and reset is like using a ball peen hammer. Unfortunately, the tool for the job is a scalpel.

My advice, with a money back guarantee, use neither.

We went into this at length in a forum thread so have a search for that for a few answers.

Some of us around doing this years ago started to use the universal selector to zero margins and padding this was long before it was widely disseminated and very long before the dire and dreadful notion of the reset.css file that one now sees cropping up in bloody theme files here there and everywhere came along.

If you understand what you are doing with that universal reset as you describe then continue it does no real harm (what was dumb though is some bright spark thinking to add border:none to the properties which just wrecks form elements with no way back), the sensible approach is to then set defaults for elements to use a a paragraph without margins is never going to work; but then again if setting defaults or global values to generic elements was there a point to zeroing them in the first place?

That's the big issue, isn't it? There's just no point to zeroing and then redefining things. Why not just skip the first step?

I do find the * useful when zeroing inside a section or table. Like this:

.noTableStyle * {
	border-collapse: collapse;
	border: none;
	overflow: visible;
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
}

Ah not so fast there was a reason at least then their was. UL elements depending on browser either padded or margined so one would have cleared both out regardless and then simply re-stated one or the other on a generic UL, it's a pretty thin reason though

Simply don't do it clearing these properties also means that you have to restate them or rather forget to thinking everything is cool, realise you are working with a dynamic site/CMS and/or worse an editor such as tinymc and that the user wanted a bullet list, oops no bullets! wonder why?

Point is that as Versh demonstrates he makes a considered decision to state some defaults and that is what we do we should know what we are doing and have full control and knowledge of when and where we need to do this.

The reset.css is a ...ing abomination it's a trap, a fix for those that simply really don't know what they are doing and as such it's pure evil anything that seeks to compensate for the users lack of knowledge is by definition simply BAD, EVIL, CORRUPT.

I come across the dam thing and want to rip it out of a template however the so called developers that have blindly coded their styles with this abomination in place are trapped by it, remove it and everything falls apart, and you would have to start going through every property ruleset setting things to rights.

One of the discussions Hugo refers to is here. Here is another.

I wouldn't go as far as Hugo, though I have considered it, but resets are a redundant waste of time, having no socially redeeming value. That pretty well matches Los Supremos definition of pornography, but not of evil.

cheers,

gary

Gary is wrong. While all good Garys stood about evil flourished.

Frontend coding will be reduced to a set number of stock files, select the ones you want and away you go. It's a conspiracy set in motion by programmers fear of anything that isn't reducible to a rigid structure with absolute rules.

I remember that war. It was quite fun and entertaining!

Hmm, it seems all the replies have missed the points - except maybe in Gary's links which I am too lazy to follow

Universal reset * {margin: 0; padding: 0;} is considered bad because it messes up with the default values on form controls. Its often much easier to leave form controls at browser/OS defaults. If your site doesn't have any forms, the universal reset is just fine.

The reset css is a development tool. It really shouldn't make it into your final site. Its a way of ensuring that any styles applied to elements are YOUR styles not those of the browser. The thinking being, that browser styles are not guaranteed to be identical. So if you come up against a browser you've not built/tested against, if all styles are your styles and the browser is standards compliant, your site will be just fine.

No Chris ALL replies haven't missed the point

The point is not specifics, note I mention that the fool that added border:0; to the universal reset needed a slap across the face with a wet fish, Zero padding and margins messing up forms, yes but then again they mess up paragraphs equally too.

You might think reset.css is a development tool and that it shouldn't make it to production but the reverse is true actually the flipping thing DOES make it to production with increasing frequency.

Anyhow as you said the links you didn't follow are where all this was discussed ad nauseam, pointless rehashing it all in potted form.

Best thing I've found is to start to try and not care anymore *shrug*