destyle.css

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

What it does

Ensures consistency across browsers (thanks normalize.css)
Removes spacing (margin & padding) and resets font-size and line-height
Sets some sensible defaults (see rules)
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.

Compare the results here.

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.

Examples

Headings

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

Creating two different styles for h1 is made easy, only the properties for the respective desired visual results have to be applied, there is no need to overwrite default styles, all 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>

Buttons

button tags have a lot of default styles that can make them cumbersome to use from a styling perspective, especially if they should look like plain links or need to wrap some other content, but button tags are the recommended elements to use as click targets for user interactions. Falling back to using <a href="#"> even with role="button" is not recomended from an accessibility standpoint as screen readers will recognize buttons as interactive elements by default and treat them accordingly. a should be used when there is the need to link to a page via href.

destyle.css resets buttons completely to make them usable as any other element * see note below.

/* Make anything look like a link, even a <button> */
.link {
  color: lightblue;
  text-decoration: underline;
}

/* Make anything look like a button
 * font styles will be inheritet from the parent */
.btn {
  padding: 0.2em 0.5em;
  border-radius: 0.2em;
  background-color: blue;
  color: white;
  text-align: center;
}

.block {
  display: block;
  width: 100%;
}

<!-- Make it look like a link -->
<button class="link">Interactive link</button>

<!-- Make anchor look like a button -->
<a href="page.html" class="btn">Link that looks like a button</a>

<!-- Use as block level element -->
<button class="block">
  <img src="..." alt="..." />
</button>

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

The box model is set to border-box for *, ::before and ::after.
The border-style is set to solid for *, ::before and ::after and the border-width is set to 0 (to hide the borders).
code, pre, kbd, samp maintain a monospaced font-family.
hr is set to be a solid 1px line using border-top that inherits its color from its parent's color property.
Inline elements that carry style (b, i, strong, etc.) are not reset.
canvas and iframe maintain their default width and height (varies depending on the browser).
button, select, textarea and input (except [type='checkbox'] and [type='radio']), are reset using appearance: none.
textarea maintains its default height.
meter and progress elements are not reset.
img has vertical-align set to bottom to prevent alignment issues.

Caveats

select elements are not completely destyled by appearance: none (varies depending on the browser). You can find a good guide for custom styling selects here.
range, color are affected by appearance: none but are not completely destyled (varies depending on the browser).
button elements that have a fixed height will center its content vertically (can not be reset).

Changelog

v2.0.0. 2020-10-15 - Add border-style: solid and border-width: 0 to *, ::before, ::after selector. This change might affect how borders are used and therefor is considered a braking change. The benefit is that simply adding a border-width to an element will display a border without the need to set the border-style explicitly.

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.

Tested with:

hidekazu-web/destyle.css