CSS reset - What exactly does it do?

Solution 1:

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?

Solution 2:

reset.css is used to normalize browser's default styles.

Example:

Solution 3:

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.