I know what CSS Reset is, but recently I heard about this new thing called Normalize.css
What is the difference between the Normalize.css and Reset CSS?
What is the difference between normalizing CSS and resetting CSS?
Is it just a new buzz word for the CSS Reset?
I work on normalize.css.
The main differences are:
Normalize.css preserves useful defaults rather than "unstyling" everything. For example, elements like sup or sub "just work" after including normalize.css (and are actually made more robust) whereas they are visually indistinguishable from normal text after including reset.css. So, normalize.css does not impose a visual starting point (homogeny) upon you. This may not be to everyone's taste. The best thing to do is experiment with both and see which gels with your preferences.
Normalize.css corrects some common bugs that are out of scope for reset.css. It has a wider scope than reset.css, and also provides bug fixes for common problems like: display settings for HTML5 elements, the lack of font inheritance by form elements, correcting font-size rendering for pre, SVG overflow in IE9, and the button styling bug in iOS.
Normalize.css doesn't clutter your dev tools. A common irritation when using reset.css is the large inheritance chain that is displayed in browser CSS debugging tools. This is not such an issue with normalize.css because of the targeted stylings.
Normalize.css is more modular. The project is broken down into relatively independent sections, making it easy for you to potentially remove sections (like the form normalizations) if you know they will never be needed by your website.
Normalize.css has better documentation. The normalize.css code is documented inline as well as more comprehensively in the GitHub Wiki. This means you can find out what each line of code is doing, why it was included, what the differences are between browsers, and more easily run your own tests. The project aims to help educate people on how browsers render elements by default, and make it easier for them to be involved in submitting improvements.
I've written in greater detail about this in an article about normalize.css
The major difference is that:
CSS resets aim to remove all built-in browser styling. Standard elements like H1-6, p, strong, em, et cetera end up looking exactly alike, having no decoration at all. You're then supposed to add all decoration yourself.
Normalize CSS aims to make built-in browser styling consistent across browsers. Elements like H1-6 will appear bold, larger et cetera in a consistent way across browsers. You're then supposed to add only the difference in decoration your design needs.
If your design a) follows common conventions for typography et cetera, and b) Normalize.css works for your target audience, then using Normalize.CSS instead of a CSS reset will make your own CSS smaller and faster to write.
Normalize.css is mainly a set of styles, based on what its author thought would look good, and make it look consistent across browsers. Reset basically strips styling from elements so you have more control over the styling of everything.
I use both.
Some styles from Reset, some from Normalize.css. For example, from Normalize.css, there's a style to make sure all input elements have the same font, which doesn't occur (between text inputs and textareas). Reset has no such style, so inputs have different fonts, which is not normally wanted.
So bascially, using the two CSS files does a better job 'Equalizing' everything ;)
regards!
Well from its description it appears it tries to make the user agent's default style consistent across all browsers rather than stripping away all the default styling as a reset would.
Preserves useful defaults, unlike many CSS resets.
First reset.css is the worst library you can use, because it removes the standard structure of HTML and displays everything you write just as text, after assigning the values of margin padding and other attributes to 0. So for example you will find that <H1>, will be the same as <H6>.
On the other hand Normalize.css uses the standard structure and also fixes almost all the errors existing in it. For example it fixes the problem with showing a form from one browser to another. Normalize fixes this by modifying this features so your elements will be shown the same on all browsers.
resetting seems a necessity to meet custom design specifications, especially on complex, non-boilerplate type design projects. It sounds as though normalizing is a good way to proceed with purely web programming in mind, but oftentimes websites are a marriage between web programming and UI/UX design rules.
This question has been answered already several times, I'll short summary for each of them, an example and insights as of September 2019:
Normalize.css - as the name suggests, it normalizes styles in the browsers for their user agents, i.e. makes them the same across all browsers due to the reason by default they're slightly different.
Example: <h1> tag inside <section> by default Google Chrome will make smaller than the "expected" size of <h1> tag. Microsoft Edge on the other hand is making the "expected" size of <h1> tag. Normalize.css will make it consistent.
Current status: the npm repository shows that normalize.css package has currently more than 500k downloads per week. GitHub stars in the project of the repository are more than 36k.
Reset CSS - as the name suggests, it resets all styles, i.e. it removes all browser's user agent styles.
Example: it would do something like that below:
html, body, div, span, ..., audio, video {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0;
font-size: 100%;
font: inherit;
vertical-align: baseline;
}
Current status: it's much less popular than Normalize.css, the reset-css package shows it's something around 26k downloads per week. GitHub stars are only 200, as it can be noticed from the project's repository.
Sometimes, the best solution is to use both. Sometimes, it is to use neither. And sometimes, it is to use one or the other. If you want all the styles, including margin and padding reset across all browsers, use reset.css. Then apply all decorations and stylings yourself. If you simply like the built-in stylings but want more cross-browser synchronicity i.e. normalizations then use normalize.css. But if you choose to use both reset.css and normalize.css, link the reset.css stylesheet first and then the normalize.css stylesheet (immediately) afterwards. Sometimes it's not always a matter of which is better, but when to use which one versus when to use both versus when to use neither. IMHO.
Normalize.css
Normalize.css is a small CSS file that provides cross-browser consistency in the default styling of HTML elements.
That means, that if we look at the W3C standards of the styles applied by the browsers, and there is an in inconsistency in one of the browsers, the normalize.css styles will fix the browser style that has the difference.
But in some cases we can’t fix the faulty browsers according to the standard, usually because of IE or EDGE. In these cases the fixes in the Normalize will apply the IE or EDGE styles to the rest of the browsers.
Real life example
Chrome, Safari and Firefox render <h1> tags that are inside an <article>/ <aside>/ <nav>/ <section> tag with a font-size that is smaller than an independent tag, and with a different margin size. These are the user agent styles in Chrome, Safari and Firefox in the case of an <h1> tag inside an <article>/ <aside>/ <nav>/ <section>
Tag
:-webkit-any(article,aside,nav,section) h1 {
font-size: 1.5em;
margin-block-start: 0.83em;
margin-block-end: 0.83em;
}
Example:
/*
Correct the font size and margin on `h1` elements within `section` and `article`
contexts in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
*/
h1 { font-size: 2em; margin: 0.67em 0;}
Reset CSS
Reset CSS takes a different approach and says that we don’t need the browsers’ default styles at all. Whatever styles we need, we’ll define in the project according to our needs. So “CSS Reset” resets all of the styles that come with the browser’s user agent.
This approach works well in the above example, with those <h1> to <h6> default styles: most of the time we want neither the browsers’ default font-size nor the browser’s default margin.
Here is an example of what a small part of CSS Reset looks like
html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote,
pre, a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code, del, dfn, em, img, ins, kbd, q, s,
samp, small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var, b, u, i, center, dl, dt, dd, ol, ul,
li, fieldset, form, label, legend, table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td,
article, aside, canvas, details, embed, figure, figcaption, footer, header, hgroup,
menu, nav, output, ruby, section, summary, time, mark, audio, video {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0;
font-size: 100%;
font: inherit;
vertical-align: baseline;
}
In the CSS Reset way, we define all HTML tags to have no padding, no margin, no border, the same font-size and the same alignments.
The problem with CSS Resets is that they are ugly: they have a big chain of selectors, and they make a lot of unnecessary overrides. And even worse, they are unreadable when debugging.
But still there are styles we prefer to reset like <h1> to <h6>, <ul>,<li> and etc.
Normalize.css :Every browser is coming with some default css styles that will, for example, add padding around a paragraph or title.If you add the normalize style sheet all those browser default rules will be reset so for this instance 0px padding on tags.Here is a couple of links for more details: https://necolas.github.io/normalize.css/ http://nicolasgallagher.com/about-normalize-css/
Related
I found this reset.css file inside a jquery image slider demo, but it was never included in the main index.html file. what is is suppose to do, and more importantly, where do you put it? Do you put it before any referenced stylesheets()?
Here is the code inside reset.css
/* CSS reset */
body,div,dl,dt,dd,ul,ol,li,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,pre,form,fieldset,input,textarea,p,blockquote,th,td {
margin:0;
padding:0;
}
html,body {
margin:0;
padding:0;
}
table {
border-collapse:collapse;
border-spacing:0;
}
fieldset,img {
border:0;
}
input{
border:1px solid #b0b0b0;
padding:3px 5px 4px;
color:#979797;
width:190px;
}
address,caption,cite,code,dfn,th,var {
font-style:normal;
font-weight:normal;
}
ol,ul {
list-style:none;
}
caption,th {
text-align:left;
}
h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
font-size:100%;
font-weight:normal;
}
q:before,q:after {
content:'';
}
abbr,acronym { border:0;
}
In the beginning, there was no standardisation on how styles worked, each browser implemented what it felt was right. One of the reasons you see so many questions about style errors in IE is because IE was the browser with the most dissimilarities from other browsers in terms of styling. Though IE has improved and so have other browsers they still apply their own borders, padding and margins, zoom, fonts to elements to give their own unique feel to pages. One example is, chrome gives its own yellow borders to text boxes. The "reset" actually "resets" all these styles to zero/none, so that you don't see any styles you haven't applied to your page.
If these styles are not "reset", you will see unwanted styles/effects and things breaking. Its generally recommended to "reset" the browser's styles.
Have a look at this article Should you Reset Your CSS?
reset.css is used to normalize browser's default styles.
Example:
Looking at the answers here there seems to be a bit of mixup between "reset" and "normalize". Their goals are slightly different.
A CSS reset is a set of styles you load prior to your other styles, to remove browser built-in styles. One of first and most popular ones was Eric Mayer's Reset CSS.
Another option is to harmonize browser built-in styles. The most popular tool to achieve this is currently Normalize.css.
Browser have different "built-in" styles which they apply to different html-elements. These styledefinitions may vary accross different browsers. The normalizing css files are meant to „normalize“ the rendering of the page across browsers by resetting these browser-specific styes.
You have to include it before your own style definitions. Otherwise these styles would possibly override (due to the cascading nature of css) your declarations too, which wouldn't make much sense;)
The most popular styles reset is probably Eric Meyer's which comes along with a little background information..
Browsers may render the HTML and CSS received according to its native rendering engine. Different browsers may use different rendering approaches [IE ;) if you know what i mean] so the intension of reset.css is to set all the attributes to common predefined values so the developers/ designers are can forget some rendering engine and start development from the scratch.
A CSS Reset (or “Reset CSS”) is a short, often compressed (minified)
set of CSS rules that resets the styling of all HTML elements to a
consistent baseline.
In case you didn’t know, every browser has its own default ‘user
agent’ stylesheet, that it uses to make unstyled websites appear more
legible. For example, most browsers by default make links blue and
visited links purple, give tables a certain amount of border and
padding, apply variable font-sizes to H1, H2, H3 etc. and a certain
amount of padding to almost everything. Ever wondered why Submit
buttons look different in every browser?
Obviously this creates a certain amount of headaches for CSS authors,
who can’t work out how to make their websites look the same in every
browser.
Using a CSS Reset, CSS authors can force every browser to have all its
styles reset to null, thus avoiding cross-browser differences as much
as possible
refer http://www.cssreset.com/what-is-a-css-reset/
Every browser has its own default user agent stylesheet, that it uses to make unstyled websites appear more legible. For example, most browsers by default make links blue and visited links purple, give tables a certain amount of border and padding, apply variable font-sizes to H1, H2, H3, etc. and a certain amount of padding to almost everything.
Ever wondered why Submit buttons look different in every browser?
Obviously this creates a certain amount of headaches for CSS authors, who can’t work out how to make their websites look the same in every browser.
Using a CSS Reset, CSS authors can force every browser to have all its styles reset to null, thus avoiding cross-browser differences as much as possible.
From the consistent base that you’ve set up via your reset, you can then go on to re-style your document, safe in the knowledge that the browsers’ differences in their default rendering of HTML can’t touch you!
Hopefully it helped, you may want to take a look at this article, Which CSS Reset Should I Use?.
In simple words CSS reset is required due to browsers’ inconsistency. In detail all browsers rendering are not the same. Therefore web rendering could be different from browser to browser.
Meyer Web providing a utmost CSS reset code if you're want to use/reset. You can find it here. If you need more details, here also you can find out what CSS reset in more details and why we need to use it.
First of all I want to tell you why I'm asking this question. I usually update projects that have been written poorly and without a reset. I want to improve the project's quality so it seems that applying a CSS reset is absolutely necessary.
I don't want to do a hard work of pixel perfect testing in every browser every time I change something and I don't want to completely rewrite all CSS.
So:
When I'm writing:
*{
margin:0;
padding:0;
border:0;
}
I know what trouble to expect: <p> will loose padding and <input>, <select>, etc. will loose padding and border. So I have to specify them manually.
This code is more difficult to understand:
*{
font-size: 100%;
font: inherit;
vertical-align: baseline;
}
And I'm completely confused with this:
body {
line-height: 1;
}
*{
font-size: 100%;
font: inherit;
vertical-align: baseline;
}
This sets all elements in the document to inherit font and font-size from parent elements by default unless specified otherwise, which can prevent user-agent stylesheets from applying font styles with less specific rules.
vertical-align: baseline; is another widespread rule to avoid user-agent rules which don't always apply this (I believe) expected default behaviour to all elements.
Here's a brief look at what this does: demo. In the demo, try setting a rule to middle rather than text-top.
body {
line-height: 1;
}
This is the same. If you're not familiar with line-height, it's quite simple. You may have dealt with it without realizing it: Sometimes it appears to be a margin issue when in fact, the line height of an element is exceeding what you expected. This often happens when you place a typeface into a design which has a very dissimilar x-height to other typefaces.
If you don't understand its function, throw some dummy text into a document and start playing with it. It's very useful (essential) for producing good typography in different situations.
It seems you're not clear on css attributes and how they effect elements. The better your understand this, the better you can utilize a reset. No reset really fits all for a few reasons. For example, you might not be using any elements where vertical-align may end up being mismatched. You may have rules in a large reset that apply to elements you don't even have.
As with anything in web design, if you don't understand it, hands on experience will teach you a lot.
Check out this fiddle with simple input control on a form:
http://jsfiddle.net/KXYHw/
Toggle reset and see how input font and font size changes.
Is it recommended to combine equal declarations in CSS in order to reduce the filesize and avoiding duplications?
For Example:
#topbar,#searchbox.focus,#usermenu li:hover a,#cart-flyout-table tbody td,.btn_remove:hover,#heading-warenkorb a:hover,.button:hover span,.input-text:focus,#pages li a:hover,select:focus,.picture-overview li:hover,#category-sub li a:hover {background-color:#e3eed3}
Is it recommended to do this for some other Properties which are used very often like float,text-align or padding for example?
The Code would getting harder to read and edit but if this will be done only for the most common properties I would accept it. What's about the performance at the rendering? Would it make my website faster or slower?
The answer is: varies.
In general, I would only recommend on doing that when the elements in question are similar in content or in area. I'll explain.
let's say you have a sidebar, and that sidebar has several headlines in it, which you wish to have similar stylings. That's perfectly acceptable to use aside h1, aside h2, aside h3 { font-weight: normal; color: blue; }.
However, to use it the way you described, for a 100 different elements on different parts of the page, then I won't recommend it.
I would avoid the type of CSS styling you mentioned.
It makes your stylesheets much harder to read and update.
Instead, I would group styles according to sections of the page
nav, header, content, etc.
or by actions
form, call to actions, etc.
or a combo of both.
If you see some duplication within those categories, then combining would be fine.
Otherwise, for example, if you want to update one a, you may need to look in four or more different places (for link, active, visited, and hover).
i can't see any problem in combining declaration.
Yet, if you want to apply the same style to your whole page, you'd better considering calling body { } or * { }.
Details to choose between these two are described here: difference between body and * in css
You may also consider using classes or css inheritance to avoid so many combination
What are cons of global css reset * { margin: 0; padding: 0; }?
What people prefer eric meyer css.
This is eric mayer css
html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0;
outline: 0;
font-weight: inherit;
font-style: inherit;
font-size: 100%;
font-family: inherit;
vertical-align: baseline;
}
/* remember to define focus styles! */
:focus {
outline: 0;
}
body {
line-height: 1;
color: black;
background: white;
}
ol, ul {
list-style: none;
}
/* tables still need 'cellspacing="0"' in the markup */
table {
border-collapse: separate;
border-spacing: 0;
}
caption, th, td {
text-align: left;
font-weight: normal;
}
blockquote:before, blockquote:after,
q:before, q:after {
content: "";
}
blockquote, q {
quotes: "" "";
}
Isn't it bit specific and heavy. I never use many elements which is in this rest like blockquote and caption.
Update:
and eric reset resetting 9 properties for 58 elements. isn't it also slow same like people talk about global reset.
What are cons to use this
* { margin: 0; padding: 0; }
select { min-width:1.5em; }
The problem is that there are some elements that need margins and/or padding to display properly, and people forget to set them back. Also, for many elements, you are going to be setting your own styles, overriding the reset, so the reset is redundant; you should instead just set the styles the way you want them.
One problem I see a lot is with lists. If you blindly apply a reset, the bullets for the list will appear outside of the containing element, which always bothers me:
+--------------------+
| Some paragraph, |
| with text. |
| |
*| One |
*| Two |
*| Three |
+--------------------+
Perhaps some designers are deliberately doing this, but I think a lot of the time I see this, it's because someone has blindly applied a reset and not thought about what it would do to the indentation of list items. If you look for this, you will see it all over the place; and pretty much invariably, the site you see it on uses a CSS reset. For more information on how to format lists correctly, see Consistent List Indentation on the Mozilla Developer Center.
Another problem is that after doing a reset, there are sometimes obscure elements that people don't remember to apply margins back to. For instance, the <dl> element; it's default style isn't great, but it at least lets you distinguish between the <dt> and <dd> elements within them. If you apply a reset, you lose that and wind up with everything crammed together with no distinction. Stack Overflow's reset does this, for instance, making <dl> elements pretty much useless:
Term
Definition
Term
Definition
Stack Overflow's reset also lacks any top or bottom margins on the <dl> element, and only a bottom margin to <p>; so I had to add an extra <br> in order to prevent the above <dl> from running up against this paragraph.
If you do use a reset, be very careful to make sure that all HTML elements do display in a sensible way. And remove the parts of your reset that are overridden by later rules that you add; there's no real reason to reset <b> and <i>, and then later apply font-weight and font-style to them, and if you reset a margin to 0 and then set it to 2 em, then why not remove the reset to 0?
Eric Meyer's CSS reset is not only to remove padding and margin, but to make default styling consistent across browsers. Many of the style rules reflect that fact. I don't know which elements are not included in his reset by default, but I can say that the particular reset you posted does contain many revisions to ensure maximal compatibility across browsers.
As for speed, if the speed of cascading < 100 styles through your site is what makes or breaks your performance, you probably have deeper issues at hand. Make sure that as many files are cached as possible and don't sweat a few extra CSS rules.
speed is a con, however slight the impact, using a global style sheet (*) applies the attributes to EVERY element possible, even if you are not using one or more
I don't see too many cons. I think using a really robust CSS reset is essential these days if you are running your site in multiple browsers.
The problem some of the time is that different elements such as p, h1,h2 etc are all affected by line-height, font-size etc, so just doing padding:0 and margin:0 won't guarantee a full reset.
Hope this helps.
The cons for a global reset are more based on your own personal setup. You can also edit someone else's reset as long as you credit them.
Cons:
I created my own reset way back when and made mistakes that I had to go back over and remove.
Hence if you use someone else's reset and it contains something you didn't expect you might 'lose functionality' on some objects that you were used to. This can be remedied by erasing the offending reset if you need to.
Pros:
I've been working with resets for almost a year now and I like it a lot. I really don't notice any performance issues and nothing surprises me about the way elements display, and I don't have to do stupid stuff like setting the margin/padding of the body and html to 0 whenever I build a new site.
The difference is miniscule, but the "star rule" actually takes longer to process as it goes through each element, applying (or in this case removing) the default styles.
Resets like Eric Meyer's target elements specifically, meaning slightly less processing time.
Setting line-height to 1 as suggested is just plain wrong from the standpoint of legibility. Even in the context of printing, layout software sets a default line-height (leading) of about 1.15. For the web, where you often have long measures (line lengths), you MUST have a line-height greater than 1 (typically, I start with 1.5 and often up it to 1.75). There is a reason for typographic principles, and that is to help readability. Setting solid, a print term for line-height of 1, is only to be used in special situations, such as very large size headings. IT SHOULD NOT BE A DEFAULT.
Yes, people "can" revise/alter the reset in their own styles, but the fact is, this reset is seen as a holy grail by so many, who blindly adopt it and never change things to use sound typographic principles. And this site is an illustration of the problem. Your eye needs some vertical space to easily follow from the end of one line to the start of another. When line-height is equal to the font-size, it makes text harder to read.
for browser there are some default margins and padding and they may be another for each element (for example another for li and for input) depending of browser.
reseting this value will make you sure that in each browsers for all elements margin & padding are 0
Dont use resets.
Resets are really annoying to fellow and future developers.
When I add a h1 tag I expect a margin and padding on it. When I add a p tag I expect space between each paragraph.
Its really annoying when people remove all of this. I end up having to go back look at their reset figure out which of the billion terrible ones out there this developer decided to use and then more then likely change.
After applying a CSS reset, I want to get back to 'normal' behavior for html elements like: p, h1..h6, strong, ul and li.
Now when I say normal I mean e.g. the p element adds spacing or a carriage return like result when used, or the size of the font and boldness for a h1 tag, along with the spacing.
I realize it is totally up to me how I want to set the style, but I want to get back to normal behavior for some of the more common elements (at least as a starting point that I can tweak later on).
YUI provides a base CSS file that will give consistent styles across all 'A-grade' browsers. They also provide a CSS reset file, so you could use that as well, but you say you've already reset the CSS. For further details go to the YUI website. This is what I've been using and it works really well.
One of the rules in applying CSS styles is "last in wins." This means if your CSS reset styles set elements to margin:0; padding:0 you can then override these rules by declaring your desired values for the same elements afterwards.
You can do this in the same file (YUI offers a one-liner reset I think so I sometimes include it as the first line in my CSS file) or in a separate file that appears after the reset CSS <link/> tag.
I think by normal behavior you mean "the defaults for my favorite browser." Your building up CSS rules for these elements is a part of the reset exercise.
Now you might want to look into Blueprint CSS or other grid frameworks. These grid frameworks almost always first reset styles to nothing, then build up the typography for common elements, etc. This could save you some time and effort.
You mean like:
* {
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
}
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, form, label, ul, ol, dl, fieldset, address {
margin-bottom: 1em;
}
?
Actually, sorry I mis-read your question, you're after something more like Eric Meyer's total reset # http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/
Rather than using a total CSS reset, think about using something like Normalize, which "preserves useful defaults".
To find out what your browser thinks of as default, open a plain HTML file with lists and view the lists with a CSS debugger like Firebug, and look under the Computed tab.
Check out YUI (Yahoo's open source user interface conventions).
They have a base stylesheet that undoes their own reset css.
They dont actaully recommend you use it in production - since its counter productive but definitely might be worth checking out the file to get relevant snippets for what you want to 'undo'.
I recommend you watch the 40 minute talk to get up to speed.
Heres a short snippet of their base.css file :
ol li {
/*giving OL's LIs generated numbers*/
list-style: decimal outside;
}
ul li {
/*giving UL's LIs generated disc markers*/
list-style: disc outside;
}
dl dd {
/*giving UL's LIs generated numbers*/
margin-left:1em;
}
th,td {
/*borders and padding to make the table readable*/
border:1px solid #000;
padding:.5em;
}
th {
/*distinguishing table headers from data cells*/
font-weight:bold;
text-align:center;
}
Download the full stylesheets below or read full documentation.
Yahoo reset css | Yahoo base (undo) reset css
I'm personally a big fan of BlueprintCSS. It resets styles across browsers and provides some really convenient defaults (that are what you want 90% of the time). It also provides a layout grid, but you don't have to use that if you don't need it.
If you want to see the css defaults for firefox, look for a file called 'html.css' in the distribution (there should be some other useful css files in the same directory). You could pick out the rules that you want, and apply them after a reset.
Also, the CSS2 standard has a sample stylesheet for html 4.
Normal behaviour for WebKit h1:
h1 {
display: block;
font-size: 2em;
margin: .67__qem 0 .67em 0;
font-weight: bold
}
Normal behaviour for Gecko h1:
h1 {
display: block;
font-size: 2em;
font-weight: bold;
margin: .67em 0;
}
The rest of the elements should be there if you search the files.
"After applying a CSS reset, I want to get back to 'normal' behavior for html elements..."
If you've applied a reset, you would then have to add the rules for what you believe to be normal behavior. Since normal behavior varies from browser to browser this question is something of a non sequitur. I like #da5id's answer - use one of the many available resets and tweak it to suit your needs.
Once you have assigned a value to a CSS property of an element, there is no way getting back the “normal” value for it, assuming “normal” means “browser default”, as it seems to mean here. So the only way to have, say, an h1 element have the browser default font-size is to not set the property at all for it in your CSS code.
Thus, to exempt some properties and elements from CSS reset, you need to use a more limited CSS reset. For example, you must not use * { font-size: 100% } but replace * by a list of selectors, like input, textarea { font-size: 100% } (the list could be rather long, but e.g. browser defaults for font-size differ from 100% for a few elements only).
It is of course possible to set properties to values that you expect to be browser defaults. There is no guarantee that this will have the desired effect on all browsers, current and future. But for some properties and elements, this can be relatively safe, because the defaults tend to be similar.
In particular, you might use section Rendering in HTML5 CR. It describes “expected rendering” – not a requirement, though browser vendors may decide to claim conformance to them if they so wish, and generally this will probably keep implementations rather similar in this respect. For example, for h1 the expected settings are (collected here into one rule – in HTML5 CR they are scattered around):
h1 {
unicode-bidi: isolate;
display: block;
margin-top: 0.67em;
margin-bottom: 0.67em;
font-size: 2.00em;
font-weight: bold;
}
(There are additional contextual rules. E.g., nesting h1 inside section is expected to affect the settings.)
I'm not resetting all the elements by default because the default styles are somehow browser depended, so they varies from browser to browser. Instead of using something like ul, ol { list-style: none; }, I'm adding a CSS class like r or reset and then I specify that if that is a ul which has a r class, reset it or otherwise please leave it to be untouched.
By the way you need to add class="reset" (for example) to all of those elements, which is extra work and code, however you'd have all of your default styles untouched at the end in return!