Re: [css-cascade] unwinding all: property

17.02.2015, 21:40, "Brian Kardell" <bkardell@gmail.com>:
> Currently many friends and people that I talk to are dismayed or surprised 
> by the behavior having expected it to do something more "default" like:
>
> all: user-agent;
>
> and reset back to -that- behavior.
> Currently it's up to them to recreate and define what would have been 
> an initially sane group of styles and that seems just wrong.

If some people have their initial (before reading documentation) expectations different from what a thing is actually about, this does not mean that the thing is useless or wrong in its current form.

The `all` property itself in conjunction with the currently available `initial` and `unset` values are very powerful and useful, they can literally change paradigms of using CSS once widely available in browsers.

For example, the `all: initial` or `all: unset` may be quite useful for external non-(i)framed widgets to prevent them from inheriting site's own styles that the widgets have nothing to do with. Or to style site's own blocks independently from each other on the page and regardless of where are they to be placed into.

"Reset" stylesheets can also become unneeded as a class.

It should also be noted that quality websites typically use almost no default user-agent styles other than, well, `font-weight: bold` for `STRONG` and `B` elements, and `font-style: italic` for `EM` and `I` elements.

If, for some reason, someone needs an ability to reset styles to user-agent's defaults instead of removing any styling at all, then, indeed, probably just an additional value like `user-agent` (or, probably better, `default`) value for the `all` property should be added to the spec:

    .example {all: default; }
    /* .example now has default user-agent styles. */

Received on Tuesday, 17 February 2015 21:56:39 UTC