Get back default properties after applying a global CSS reset

Question

Some legacy code that I have to build upon, really makes me feel the cons of global CSS reset.

I have the old foo.css that starts with

Answer 1

There’s the proposed value initial for setting a property to its initial value, without finding the explicit value. But it’s still very much draft-stage and hardly implemented in any browser.

Moreover, that’s probably even not what you’d like to achieve. If I understand you correctly, you would want to set e.g. the top and bottom margins of h2 elements to the browser default value. I don’t think there’s even any proposed way of doing that in CSS. The specifications do not define the browser defaults. The initial value of, say, the margin property is 0. The reason why headings have top and bottom margin by default is that the browser applies, at least conceptually, a browser style sheet. The CSS specs suggest a default browser style sheet but do not mandate one, and browser may (and actually do) deviate from the suggestions.

In practice, the best shot in the given situation would be to check Appendix D of the CSS 2.1 spec and use the values given there. For things like margins, this would mostly create the effect of using browser defaults.