What are master style sheets for?

[dannynosleeves]

I was reading this article about master style sheets and didnt quite understand what purpose they served.


Should they be added as a second stylesheet, or should you add them to your basic stylesheet?

[Toon]

There's loads of way's to reset the stylesheets, now. There's a few here.

[focused]

I'll try to give an example, and put it in easy terms.

If you were to start writing some xhtml..... let's say you use a couple of headers..... h1, h2, h3, etc. And you DON'T use a stylesheet yet. If you were to view that code in a browser, you would find that even though you did not use any style sheet what so ever, the page is still being rendered in a specific way.

For instance, h1 is going to be bigger than h2, which is going to be bigger than h3. Everything probably is rendered in a certain font, and so on and so forth. You have to ask yourself, why is it displaying this way if I didn't ask it to?

Basically, all browsers have a basic stylesheet they apply to all pages. Usually if you have a stylesheet, yours take precedent. Now I explain that, to explain this.

A master stylesheet, is basically a style sheet you use on every page, to render a page a basic way. You usually use a master, and then the real one you want to use. The use is, if you don't specify how a certain element is going to be displayed, the master stylesheet takes care of that. Look at it, as the foundation of your css.

Some people also refer to the master style sheet as a reset style sheet, because that is what is also does, it overrides all the styles the browser applies to a web page.

[unimatrixZxero]

Great explanation I think I'll refer people to it when they ask me next time.