Hi Nick, I think this is very interesting but I have two problems with it: 1. Once you have removed all margin and padding, this method relies on you specifically styling the margins and padding of each HTML element that you intend to use. On smaller sites where you may only need to style specific containers and elements this method is very verbose and wasteful.
This means you are almost replicating aspects of the supposed default browser style sheet: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/sample.html 2. If you were to pass your site on to others who were less aware of CSS, this method could cause great confusion. The method relies on an understanding that any used HTML elements will have to be specifically styled. You may have styled all elements you needed at the time, but what if a new element was added by someone else at a later date? They may have no idea why the element does not operate like it should. For example, what if you never needed a blockquote (and therefore never specifically styled this element) but someone needed in the future? They may be very confused why the blockquote had no margins - which it normally would in default behaviour. A softer option may be to do this on specific troublesome elements (by troublesome I mean ones that may vary greatly across browsers). For example; forms, fieldsets, submit buttons etc. Like anything, I guess it comes down the the needs of the site and the developer. 2c Russ > I was just reading the article excerpted below and was curious as to > how many on the list have used this technique of initially setting all > padding and margins to 0 and if so how successful was it? > > * { > padding:0; > margin:0; > } ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************