“Minute modifications involve a paring down of quotation around blockquotes and qs. Meanwhile the bigger modification includes the removal of the inherent values in the first rule—the one that wiped out boldfacing, font variants or italicizing in browsers except Internet Explorer.
[The inherit] effects, as seen in my development environment, will still serve the purpose of reminding me to build up the styles I actually want, and not use the browsers’ defaults as a crutch. There is the possibility of my forgetting that (for example) IE/Win italicizes em when I don’t want it to, but that’s something I’ll catch during the browser testing phase.
But over time, I’ve come to realize that this is more than just a throwaway development tool. It really is the beginning of a baseline style sheet. (Or can be.) Things like boldfacing and italics are some of the most obvious textual effects readers will see, and to have reset styles that treat them inconsistently across browsers doesn’t make sense.
Of course, browsers might treat elements differently when it comes to boldness and decoration and such. But unfortunately, without inherit as a viable solution (due to the lack of support in Explorer), we’re stuck accepting browser defaults. This is one area where defaults are pretty well consistent across the board, so it’s a small risk to be taking. And this certainly doesn’t preclude anyone from adding to these styles to create their own reset that explicitly handles elements like em and strong.
Which leads me to why I explicitly set ins and del. In some browsers, inserted text is underlined. This leads to confusion, because most people expect underlined text to be a link. I decided to explicitly switch that off and leave a note about it, much as I did with :focus styles.
And why am I not zeroing out deprecated elements, like center? Because they shouldn’t even be in the markup. The way to handle deprecated elements is with something like Marco Battilana’s Big Red Angry Text, not silently neutering them.”
The above words from the designer himself are going to clear up some questions about the reset. This is sure to convince others that there is more to CSS than mere styling.
To see more details, visit http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/01/15/resetting-again/.