A few weeks ago in Portland Code School I learned that having a “normalized” or “reset” stylesheet was “a thing.” Something about this seemed familiar.

Back when CSS3 was somewhat new, and I first tried to make websites, I created a stylesheet to make your webpages mimic the interface with the Lynx browser (wikipedia). I did it as kind of joke, but one of things that quickly became apparent during testing was that I would need to specify styles for every html element to make sure they were rendered the way I wanted.

To test the lynx stylesheet, I created a webpage which had every element I found in the HTML 4.01 spec, including the depreciated ones, loaded up the test page in both lynx and Firefox and fiddled about until it worked as well as I could make it.

Due to a tragic mishap, I lost the test file and original sources of my lynx stylesheet. I was able to recover the latest version though and recently created a GitHub repo for further development.

This got me thinking about the general purpose of "unstyling". Browsers, have to make their webpages look like something. In the case of Firefox, you can find a copy of the default CSS in your installation folder or here:

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/layout/style/

As nice as it is to have this around, a project like normalize.css is still necessary to standardize all the other browsers. Which I find really funny, in a bleakly philosophical way: Some minimal style is necessary, to display at all, but almost no one will love it.

We have this notion of “separating style from structure” which makes me think of the classical dualism of form and substance. When we suppose they may be separate, we may become confounded if challenged to find, or even imagine a substance without a form. I feel like I would less confounded if challenged to imagine a form without a substance, but I suspect this to be a cultural artifact. I should feel confounded either way.

But I digress.

I looked around for other information about reset.css and normalize.css. Sixrevisions.com provides a nice history of CSS reset here along with other tutorials about priming your webpages. Here’s a couple of useful Stackoverflow discussions: “Which HTML5 reset CSS do you use and why?” and What is the difference between normalize.css and reset CSS”.

We’ve advanced some way since lynx.css and the more radical unstyling techniques have come into use. What’s next? For myself, and lynx.css, I think it would be amusing to modernize lynx.css for HTML5 and maybe make a Jekyll theme when I have time.