When it comes to CSS, there are a few different ways to ensure that your styles are consistent across different browsers and devices. One of the most common ways to do this is by using a CSS reset, normalize, or reboot styles. But what exactly do these terms mean, and how do they differ from one another?
When building a website, it's important to have a consistent and predictable starting point for your CSS styles. One way to achieve this is by using a CSS reset, normalize, or reboot styles. These are stylesheets that are applied to the base HTML elements to ensure consistency across browsers.
A CSS reset is a set of CSS styles that are applied to all HTML elements, which will remove all default browser styles. This ensures that all elements are on the same starting point, making it easier to create consistent styles across all browsers. The most popular CSS reset is Eric Meyer's "Reset CSS" which sets margins and paddings to 0, and applies other styles to standardize the look of HTML elements across different browsers.
CSS normalize, on the other hand, is a set of CSS styles that aims to make default styles consistent across different browsers. Unlike a CSS reset, normalize styles do not completely remove default browser styles. Instead, it makes adjustments to the default styles to ensure that they are consistent across browsers. The most popular CSS normalize stylesheet is "Normalize.css" which is used to patch up the inconsistencies that are caused by different browser defaults.
A reboot is a CSS library which is inspired by Normalize.css and builds upon Normalize.css . It provide basic styling for native HTML elements, Normalize.css has been criticized by some developers for not providing enough styling for native HTML elements. Reboot.css builds on Normalize.css, adding a set of CSS classes for typography, margins, and padding, as well as some additional helper classes.
In summary, the main difference between these three styles is the degree to which they reset the default styles of elements. A CSS reset will completely reset all styles, while normalize.css and reboot.css will preserve some default styles and only normalize the styles that are likely to cause cross-browser inconsistencies.
Which one to use will depend on the specific project and the desired outcome. If you want a completely blank slate to work with, a CSS reset might be the best choice. If you want to keep some of the default styles and just want to make sure things look consistent across browsers, then normalize.css or reboot.css might be a better fit.