Why don't CSS resets use '*' to cover all elements?

For example, the Meyer reset has a long list of elements¹ which I believe can be replaced with a *?

I have seen some use of:

* {
   margin: 0;
   padding: 0;
 }

But more "advanced" resets seem to go with explicitly stating the tags.

The only elements I don't see covered in the tag list that are covered (I presume) with a * are input, button, and select—the Eric Meyer reset, in fact, doesn't appear to really deal with those elements at all. If avoiding resetting these elements is the issue…why wouldn't you? Browsers obviously don't all display form elements the same.

^{1 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 if you're curious.}

Solution 1:

You've guessed correctly - the reason is form elements.

If you set border: 0 on for example an input, it will lose the native styling.

For example: http://jsfiddle.net/nrB6N/

And, there's no way to get that default styling back.

Solution 2:

* is really, REALLY bad for performance (doesn't really matter on small sites, but think the repercussions for 5000+ HTML elements for example). Targetting specific elements is always faster and more efficient. It's a thing to also keep in mind when choosing wether to use an ID or an CLASS. Count in the more than common JavaScript today, and you find out that targetting elements with ID's or precise CSS statements yields in performance improvements.

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rendering.html#UseEfficientCSSSelectors

ps. Apart from speed, it also affects input elements, which after the * border, padding, and margin 0 become quite difficult to style so that they look the same accross browsers, especially in IE. Read more: http://www.christianmontoya.com/2007/02/01/css-techniques-i-use-all-the-time/