Steven Grindle created this html page with a linked external style sheet on 27 Jan 2008 for the purpose of demonstrating how to force FF2 and IE7 browsers to render the html tags <body>, <p>, <ol>, <ul>, <blockquote> to my liking. If you like it, use it and reference me. I preview my designs using Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 only.

First and foremost, I zero all padding and margin styles as suggested by Charles Wyke-Smith in his excellent book "Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide". Then I can define the margins and padding of paragraphs, lists and blockquotes.

You can copy/paste the .css code below. By clicking here you can see what this page looks like without the styles; e. g. the way a brower would display them by default.

  1. To zero the margins and padding that browsers may use, the first line of my .css style sheet is
    2. * {margin:0; padding:0;}
  2. My <body> tag forces the browser to use a base font of sans-serif. Sans-serif fonts work better for computer monitors. I prefer a smaller base font, dark blue text and a light gray background. The gray background allows me to add white as a usable color.
    3. body {
    font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
    font-size: 0.9em;
    background-color: #EEEEEE;
    color:#000066
    }
  3. Because I have zeroed the margins and padding, I must define them for <p> tags so that paragraphs will be blocked in the manner I prefer.
    4. p {
    padding: 3px 5px;
    margin: 0px;
    }
  4. Likewise the list tag <ol> needs to have defined margins and padding.
    ol {
    padding-right: 10px;
    padding-left: 10px;
    margin-right: 5px;
    margin-left: 5px;
    list-style-position: inside;
    }
  5. Here is the <blockquote>
    blockquote {
    font-size: 0.9em;
    color: #009900;
    margin: 1px 30px;
    }

It is not perfect but it helps me. If you can use it go ahead. The end.