# What's a solid starting point (global reset) for a CSS file?

Browsers often have different ways of rendering the same element. For example we expect lists to be left-indented. Firefox does this by applying a left padding of 40 pixels to an unordered list (`<ul>`). Either Opera or Internet Explorer acheives the same effect by applying a *margin* of 40 pixels.

Now this is fine and dandy if you don’t want to change that indent value.

Let’s say you test in Firefox want to pull the list back a little so you:

`ul {  padding-left: 30px;}`

Looks good… until some other browser adds that 30 pixels of padding onto their 40 pixels of margin. Crap. The original solution proposed was simple and elegant:

``

- {  
     padding:0;  
     margin:0;  
    }

It also broke forms and obviously is not inclusive of everything for a true “global whitespace reset.” You can read more on this implementation (which was revised) on the now classic [leftjustified.net](http://leftjustified.net/journal/2004/10/19/global-ws-reset/) post.

Yahoo! have their [own <span class="caps">CSS</span> Reset](http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/reset/), which has a broader scope. Not sure setting h1 through h6 at 100% is an improvement over default behaviour though. ^^

An alternate (still in progress) reset [is up at Eric Meyers website](http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/), and has evolved through a couple comment heavy blog posts.