> This is what our standard DOM elements in the browser should look like.
I agree with this, but it would also be a nightmare for people trying to make their own styles. Even the current default styles are a bit annoying for this. I've long dreamt of some sort of way to switch between some sort of chrome vs content styles. So for my navbar and embedded visualizations/interactive elements I switch to chrome mode and get minimal default styles (maybe just font size, font family and text colour) but the main content of the article can get the user's preferred styles.
> I agree with this, but it would also be a nightmare for people trying to make their own styles. Even the current default styles are a bit annoying for this.
The obvious solution would be a CSS instruction that really reset (like everything to 0, none, etc. — not to default styles) all properties for the selected elements and its children. Something like:
:root { default-style: none; } /* could be "none" for reset, or "default" to apply the user-agent default style */
Having been building websites since the mid 90's, I think the biggest challenge with that is actually breaking existing sites. Nowadays when you start a new site you almost always start with CSS, but that wasn't always the case and even today there are still sites that use the default styles as a baseline and just tweak as they go.
If we replace the default styles, a ton of sites are going to look very different than they were intended. We could do an "opt in" though that should be very easy to declare (similar to new versions of HTML, such as HTML 5) and get you on the new default style. I think that would be great!
I agree with this, but it would also be a nightmare for people trying to make their own styles. Even the current default styles are a bit annoying for this. I've long dreamt of some sort of way to switch between some sort of chrome vs content styles. So for my navbar and embedded visualizations/interactive elements I switch to chrome mode and get minimal default styles (maybe just font size, font family and text colour) but the main content of the article can get the user's preferred styles.