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About normalize.css: a modern, HTML5-ready alternative to CSS resets

by necolas on 2/28/12, 3:58 PM with 23 comments

• by ajanuary on 2/28/12, 4:44 PM

  One of the big things I like about CSS resets is it forces me to think about every design decision rather than just going with the 'sensible' browser defaults.

  I guess with discipline I can train myself to always think about things like the rhythm created by font-size and margins on headers, but I've not experienced the downsides of a full reset yet.

• by jsdalton on 2/28/12, 6:26 PM

  I use it indirectly (via Twitter Bootstrap) and I have no complaints.

  I found it a bit curious though that they don't dogfood it on their Github page (http://necolas.github.com/normalize.css/), but I guess that's not a huge deal or anything.

• by bcullman on 2/28/12, 10:02 PM

  Perhaps I am missing something here. I looked at the demo page in FF10, Chrome17, and IE 8, and I see different spacing in rendering across those platforms (mostly in IE8, but FF10 and Chrome17 are not the same either)

  http://i.imgur.com/SMwHD.png

• by stepeight on 2/28/12, 4:16 PM

  I have been using normalize for the past few months in all of my new projects and I can attest to its superiority over the standard resets. Great work, as ever, necolas.

• by pbhjpbhj on 2/28/12, 6:37 PM

  Doesn't this mean that you have to address the specifics of each browser that might use your site though?

  So if Konqueror 3.42 [made up version] has a bug giving a default of double the normal padding on h1 then I have to specifically check that this is addressed by the attempted normalization.

  >"Normalize.css is an alternative to CSS resets. The project is the product of 100′s of hours of extensive research by @necolas and @jon_neal on the differences between default browser styles."

  Makes me think that I'm going to need to update every site using this with every new browser version that has a pixel difference in it's default style; a situation that a reset just works on.

  Of course resets are subject to browser bugs too but it seems that they are more robust and more likely to just work ...?

• by gioele on 2/29/12, 12:25 PM

  > Normalize.css is modular

  That is a strong claim given that the "modularisation" is realised adding banner comments in the CSS. I think it would had been better to have separate @import'ed files. Those worried about performance could use minificators while other, like me, could just use the parts they are interested in, in my case

      @import 'normalize.css/html5-fixes.css'
      @import 'normalize.css/html5-defaults.css'

• by run4yourlives on 2/28/12, 5:38 PM

  Is it just me or is hosting a single css file on a git repository a little silly? Not like one would continually check out the latest version.

  That said, a reset file is always a good idea, and this is a nice evolution thereof.

• by ars on 2/29/12, 5:47 AM

  This looks really nice. The only thing I didn't like is the proportional font for input fields - it makes it hard to synchronize size and maxlength.

• by hluska on 2/29/12, 3:47 AM

  I just tried out normalize in a project I'm working on - so far, everything is great. Thanks for the hard work, Necolas!

• by chmike on 2/28/12, 9:08 PM

  Any plans to provide a version made available by a CDN like jQuery ?