CSS resets (geek pitting ahead!)

The BBQ Pit
1

The next person I see using a


* {margin:0;padding:0}

or even worse,


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 {padding:0;margin:0}

is getting SHOT IN THE FUCKING HEAD.

You fucking idiots. Do you not realize that you have now reset all img tags so that vspace and hspace do not work? Do you not realize lists no longer have indents on them? Do you NOT FUCKING REALIZE it breaks everything the user puts into the wysiwyg editor?

Client complains aligning an image and adding vspace does not work. I find the culprit in the * set of rules. I remove it. Client comes back saying now there is too much spacing between paragraphs.

Reset things as you bloody fucking need to! Do none of you understand it’s easier to slap a class or id on something and then reset and change your code under that? Do none of you understand it’s easier to change what you need when you need to as opposed to changing EVERYTHING and having to redo EVERYTHING?

Hey guys, I want to renovate my living room! Hey, why don’t we demolish the house and build a new one? Who cares if it’ll cost 5x more, cool people told us to do it!

Love,
someone who actually does this shit for a living and realizes that ideals != reality

(Because someone will call me on it: yes, there are times to use reset css. They are rarer than common use would dictate.)

2

wysiwyg = what you see is what you get (Flip Wilson reference)

As a non-computer geek, do I win a prize?
How about if I can prove I haven’t used GoTo in almost 24 years?

3

Dude - goto is a programmers best friend!

4

Wow, I thought I was just being a jerk by being mad at the designer who did this to me.

I’m not the designer, I am the person who actually puts designs into a real, working, usable Web site.

Designers do a lot of stupid things that make my job hard, but this is probably one of the worst.

Also bad is mis-spelling things in code, and then using the mis-spelled word over and over again, and using a unique class name for every single element. I don’t understand how these people got swayed by the “use CSS because you can make sweeping changes with one edit” argument and then turn around and make it so that every element has its own unique class and “sweeping changes” are thus impossible.

5

Hey, fuck off. I like my CSS reset and I’ll do it the way I want.

6

:smiley: That’s why I put the house metaphor in there.

7

Will you get mad if I come back to you and say ‘your reset is fucking up all the lists on the site. fix it now and tell the client you messed it up in the first place’? Will you vouch to our boss that it was your bad and the hour I spent cleaning it up* wasn’t my fault?

  • I’m not just going to turn around and go #content ul li {}, I’m going to go back and do it so that the only thing that actually needed the reset, for example a dropdown menu, is reset?
8

No one works on my sites except me and the other employees here. If a client wants to work on their site they are allowed to do so, with FTP, but I highly doubt a single one of them knows what CSS even is.

9

I hate CSS so fucking much. The idiotic inconsistent naming conventions. The stupid inconsistent box model. Floats. Hours upon hours of work to make a layout that a <table> could do in 30 seconds. Fucking floats. Ugly selector syntax. MOTHERFUCKING FLOATS I HATE THEM GOD DAMMIT.

And why is it so hard to do rounded corners?

I’m so glad I’m not The Designer where I work. He is a true CSS genius. I just spit out the data, he makes it pretty. Works for me.

10

But a lot of times in the real world the client wants one of dem dere “CMS systems” and the ability to “make our own new pages” or edit data on pages w/o having to pay someone to do it for them so they pay up front for CMS and you build this nice custom CMS and it all works well until the client puts a little unordered list in the HTML and calls you up complaining because “why are the dots in my list hanging off the side of the page like that?”

Because the designer had no forethought, is why.

11

Well, if it’s a CMS designer who is creating templates for any pleb off the street to work with, then yeah, pitting approved.

12

CSS is a special circle of hell that takes years to master. And no one cares except other developers. Too many people forget that clients don’t care, just do what they want.

You understand. This makes me happy.

13

You know, looking at this you all are scaring me! I still code in HTML - am I going to be forced into CSS??

:eek:

14

No, curlcoat. You do what you want, sweetie. Do what works and works best, not what the Internet says you should do. Nobody actually knows how to use CSS. Not even the people who use it to make things look dyn-o-mite. Even they don’t write elegant code.

The only way you’ll be forced in to using CSS is if you work on something where someone else did all the designing and the HTML and there is a ton of CSS in it and you will be baptised by fire into learning how CSS works.

Someone will say “I have this site and I need to add one little button here, if you please” and you will say no prob. Then you add the button and it’s not where you thought you put it. It’s also not the color you set it to be and for some reason the font looks way funny.

Then you troll through the 4000-line CSS script to figure out wtf, and you get the color fixed but now it’s really smooshed and it’s still floating at the top of the site. Then you start removing every single element on the page one by one to figure out what is displacing and smooshing your button, and now you’ve completely dismantled EVERYTHING and it turns out the problem was that one thing was floated right and it was 2px too wide, and it needs a clear: declaration but once you figure that out it’s smooth sailing, 6 hours later.

Then, you open it up in IE…

CSS is not elegant or easier. You know what’s elegant and easier? Real programming platforms like PHP or ASP.NET and include files.

Never trust anything that doesn’t run server-side and requires a lot of “hacks” :slight_smile:

15

Vomit.

Aww, don’t mistrust all client-side stuff because of the shitfulness of CSS. JQuery and MathJax are pretty fucking awesome.

16

I just end every line in my .css file with !IMPORTANT. That way, it always works.
Whaaaaaa…? **Zip, ** stop throwing things at me! :smiley:

17

Yeah, because real programmers don’t need no stinkin’ server-side code. :rolleyes:

18

Yea I don’t get the CSS hate. I agree CSS is crap for layouts, but for formatting, sizing, and the like it’s the best. You can use it to move all that distraction up to the head of the document, or to another style sheet. Which keeps your html simple and focused.
I do get the * hate. Why would people do that?

19

I’m all for using CSS to make every headline look the same and for making forms look good and all sorts of useful stuff.

But layout is the biggest problem. And improperly using CSS, or just using it like an asshole (where there’s no .headline class but there’s .thispage-headline, .thatpage-headline, .etc-headline…or using #id declarations all over the place) is a problem.

No one is saying that CSS is inherently bad.

Ok maybe I aluded to that being the case with curlcoat. If that’s true then sorry. Yes curlcoat you are going to have to learn CSS and drop the FONT and STRONG tags. But it will make you happy.

20

Um, you don’t sound happy… :smiley: