Expressing IT

Yesterday,  like every other “Ground Hog  Day” ,  I was working on some CSS/tableless  layouts. All was going well in IE 7, FF 3 and Chrome, untill suddenly,   I saw some un-ignorable margins seen only in Google Chrome.   Though very strange and worring, It  was some new bug/issue that I had come accross, there was  finally some spice in my mundane work . Sad (but nice) it got fixed within a few minutes of the probe…

Basically ,  It looked like  Google Chrome ignored my CSS Resets  ( margin:0px).  It actually was  caused by the user agent stylesheet (-webkit-padding-start:40px).  So the solution was to reset this style by setting padding:0 the misbehaving elements .
A  good way to prevent this problem from happening to any element is use a global CSS Rest as follows

*{ margin:0; padding:0; }

What is User Agent Style Sheets (Specification) ?
The following  excerpt is taken  from http://meiert.com/en/blog/20070922/user-agent-style-sheets/ , follow link to read more on User Agent Style Sheets

CSS 1 introduces the idea by stating that each User Agent (UA, often a ‘web browser’ or ‘web client’) will have a default style sheet that presents documents in a reasonable – but arguably mundane – manner. CSS 2 says that conforming user agents must apply a default style sheet (or behave as if they did) and that a user agent’s default style sheet should present the elements of the document language in ways that satisfy general presentation expectations for the document language; CSS 3 is likely to be of the same mind.

Since the CSS specifications leave it up to implementations whether to use a “real” style sheet for default display or not, it’s not astonishing that you don’t find a default style sheet in every browser’s installation folder. Unlike Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as well as Opera, for example (and as far as I know), Gecko browsers like Firefox and Netscape Navigator (look for “html.css”) but also Konqueror make it rather simple to comprehend their default styling.