Wasted $150 on a fancy CSS reset library that broke my whole layout

I was rebuilding my company's roofing site and thought buying a premium CSS reset would save me hours of cross-browser headaches. Installed it last Tuesday and suddenly my header was sitting 200px lower in Firefox than Chrome. Spent two full afternoons debugging before realizing the reset was resetting things I never asked for. Anyone else get burned by a tool that promised to fix everything but just made a bigger mess?

2 comments

2 Comments

betty_ward20d ago

joel280 nailed it with the piece by piece thing. Its like when you buy a fancy new tool for your garage thinking it will fix everything but it just creates new problems you never had. I see this all the time with those big kitchen gadgets that promise to chop and blend and steam everything, but then you end up washing five extra parts just to make a salad. These resets are the same way they come with all these assumptions about how your layout works and before you know it you are chasing down bugs that didnt exist before. I learned the hard way that a simple, custom reset with just the basics like box-sizing and margin zeros saves way more time than trusting someones else's idea of a perfect starting point. You end up spending more hours fixing the fix than you would have spent just typing ten lines of your own CSS.

joel28023d ago

Did you ever try rolling back piece by piece instead of the whole library at once? I used to think these resets were all the same, but one that messed up my dropdown menus changed my mind real quick. Sometimes the old way of typing a few basic resets yourself is way less trouble than paying for a headache like that.