Why reset? Set instead. Simply put, replace your reset style sheet with one that SETs all the basic styles to the defaults you would like to start from instead. You still get a good baseline across browsers by setting all your styles to a standard format. I just don’t see the point of doing something to force me to specifically undo it later. I would much rather start with a style sheet that has a reasonable starting point that overrides the differences between browsers while at the same time making elements appear as I would expect them to everywhere.

So how about we see the death of the reset style sheet and the birth of frameworks with set style sheets. I think I will work on creating my own set.css in the near future.

We have an aging custom CMS at work that has a WYSIWYG editor. It’s nice and all, but for some crazy reason the developers felt that paragraphs should be differentiated by divs with inline styles rather than the obvious paragraph element. It’s completely nuts.

My primary beef is with Word and the prominence of word processors as writer’s tools. Like mentioned above, most people that use them don’t use them well. Their files would be much smaller and more useful for automated workflows if they would only be allowed to use rich text. All a proper writer needs is line breaks, bold, italic and probably an easy to use glyph menu. Word makes the most inefficient, cumbersome markup to style its documents. A real nightmare as I’m sure you all know.

In my experience many professional writers still enter two spaces after periods, so I doubt that there is a very high level of intelligent concern amongst writers about the manner in which their files are saved. As a graphic designer/web developer I find that, all arrogance aside, I know a great deal more about the subtleties of written communication than most professional writers. I cringe every time I meet a writer that hasn’t read or even heard of ‘The Elements of Style’.

Sadly, the field of graphic design is full of people that, thanks to increased WYSIWYG-ness, are starting to resemble their counterparts in the writing field. Totally uneducated about their craft and completely dependent on computer programs to execute their work.

This idea of WYSIWYG is the problem. It is a method that should only be used by people that have first graduated from the school of WYSIWYM. ;)