Basic building blocks for cross-browser equivalence?

I found my self in my old routines, building the开发者_Go百科 web page as I have always been doing. Just to include a bunch of patches to fix the inconsistencies between different browsers. So I was wondering...

Is there a basic list of building blocks, routines or settings that make HTML and CSS look the same in every browser?

If I can start out with this clean set of building blocks that I know will look the same in all browsers I could later on look to patch up different browser inconsistencies.

But wouldn't it be a good feeling to know that the foundation of the web site will fit all browsers?

I would suggest taking a peek at one of the prevalent CSS frameworks out in the wild:

• BluePrint http://www.blueprintcss.org/
• 960 Grid System http://960.gs/
• Elastic CSS http://elasticss.com/

Some of those already use reset.css by Eric Meyers but if you want something lighter than a full framework that's a great place to start: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/

Of the frameworks, I've used BluePrint the most. Its nice to know that I can setup a grid in a matter of minutes and not have to worry about a broken layout.

There are few problems with the basics of HTML and CSS. If you use a modern browser to first check your markup, and validate to check for errors, your problems will be few and far between. Consistently I find people who don't validate their markup and/or use IE as their test browser. Both are the cause of 95% of their problems.

If those two situations alone are used, you don't need to use any frameworks.