One of the big things I like about CSS resets is it forces me to think about every design decision rather than just going with the 'sensible' browser defaults.
I guess with discipline I can train myself to always think about things like the rhythm created by font-size and margins on headers, but I've not experienced the downsides of a full reset yet.
As far as downsides of a full reset, I dislike the way my inspect panels are cluttered with reset information for each element. Having switched to normalize a few months ago, inspection tools now hold only the relevant CSS rules for the item I'm inspecting.
And I'm not sure why a CSS reset would make you consider each design decision; most design work should be done prior to coding, and its a rare instance that I don't replace most defaults.
I agree. Maybe I'm missing the point, but I loathe default stylings. Ugly grey buttons and annoying blue html links normalized across browsers are still ugly grey buttons and annoying blue html links.
The point of normalize, at least how I use it and understand it, is if you wanted to change a default style you just go into the normalize.css file and change the style of links, or buttons in there, and be assured they work cross browser.
As apposed to having to to declare a reset, and then re-declaring everything again.
He says this in the article too:
"Approach 1: use normalize.css as a starting point for your own project’s base CSS, customising the values to match the design’s requirements."
The point of normalize is not to keep links blue, and buttons gray. They find the rendering discrepancies between browsers, fix them, and make it easy for you to change.
agreed. But "forcing me to think" sounds like a lot of work, I would argue resets are less work.
normalizations are all about memorization, ie default for h1 is A h3 B. To me this is far more complicated than deciding i want X, what do i need to do to produce that. maybe a little extra typing, (probably a trivial amount for a website or web app of any complexity).
I guess with discipline I can train myself to always think about things like the rhythm created by font-size and margins on headers, but I've not experienced the downsides of a full reset yet.