Add Normalize to my HTML5 CSS

Jack Kozik — Fri, 02 Aug 2013 17:49:11 +0000

As part of updating my website to HTML5 boilerplate 4.2, I am finally converting my CSS to use normalize.css.

My original index.html file used the following


...
    
    
    
...

where style.css borrowed heavily from a prior version of H5BP and most of my custom styles were in screen.css. To me, all of this worked, but I was delighted to follow H5BP’s lead and refactor my CSS to use normalize.css.

My new index.html file looks like this:


...
    
    
    
...

where normalize.css is version v1.1.1 taken from the H5BP github repository. The main.css is the H5BP file with my custom CSS inserted at the designated spot (“Author’s custom styles” section).

So I didn’t trust that this work work very well. I have always been kludgy and I mostly hack together my CSS; I am happy to align with a framework like H5BP, but I wasn’t optimistic that this would be easy.

So, I took an intermediate step to Add Normalize to my HTML5 CSS by creating a temporary file called indexnormalize.html. In Chrome, I setup two tabs, one with my index.html and the other with my indexnormalize.html and I did side by side comparisons, liberally using the “Inspect Element” developer tool built into Chrome.

After about an hour, I was done. It wasn’t that bad. Here’s a summary of the tweaks that I had to make to my CSS:

Background color. My web page has a black background. I have been setting it using the body tag, and I should have been using the html tag. The comments in normalize explain why this is better and there’s a whole series of blog postings explaining why my prior design was clueless (at best). Reference: Understanding the HTML versus BODY Element in CSS

/* Part of file main.css */
/* old: */
body {
 ...
 background-color: black;
}
---
/* new: */
body {
 ...
}
html {
 background: black;
}

Drop down menu padding. The way my drop down menus were defined, the normalize.css margin and padding mucked things up. Rather than redesigning my menus, I added some CSS to compensate.

In normalize.css the following tripped me up:

/* Part of file normalize.css */
ul {
 margin: 1em 0;
}
ul {
 padding: 0 0 0 40px;
}

To fix this, in my custom css I added:

/* Part of file main.css */
#page-bar {
 padding: 0 0 0 0px;
 margin: 0 0;
}

Nav tag. My menus use the nav tag and so does normalize.css. I had to also fix the margin and padding there, too

/* Part of file main.css */
nav ul {
 margin: 0;
 padding: 0;
}

Printing styles. Also, I had to go into a different section of main.css to edit in my print styles. In the section titled “Print Styles” I put the following at the very end:

/* Part of file main.css */
...
 tbody, tr, img { page-break-inside: avoid; }
 tbody { border: 1px solid #999; }
 #head, #foot { display: none; }
}

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Add Normalize to my HTML5 CSS