CSS: Explicitly declaring position, padding, margin, and overflow for every item?

I've been working for a guy whose been teaching me css. I made a website based on his designs which I'm pretty proud of, but he got back to me saying that I need to explicitly declare the padding, margin, position, and overflow (specifically every item should have "overflow:hidden") on every item. Is there any basis to this at all? Is there anything I can use to refute this? I thought that declaring something like div,span,h1,[...] {padding:0;margin:0;postion:static;overflow:hidden} would take ca开发者_开发问答re of everything due to the cascade.

Another resource, that I think is better for resetting CSS is YUI Reset (from Yahoo!). It has a great reset CSS file with additional files you can add on the end to make everything look consistent cross-browser (including fonts which can get very annoying very fast in CSS)

Here are the links

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/reset/

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/base/

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/fonts/

I use the Reset, Base and Font stylesheets (in that order) in ALL my web projects.

Using a reset stylesheet that consists of "* { margin: 0; padding: 0; }" will create even worse cross-browser issues. You need to reset everything and THEN declare a base that all the browsers can start from (the purpose of reset.css and base.css).s

Except for increasing the CSS file size, there is no reason to explicitly declare common properties down a cascade if already declared on a generic item. The browser should take care of properly rendering the items, taking the cascade structure into account.

Blindly applying styles to every element will surely give you unwanted results, but you could nail everything with * { margin: 0; padding:0; etc }

I would recommend using a reset stylesheet instead to reduce browser inconcistencies, this one is pretty popular: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/

Note that reset stylesheets have their own (usually minor) issues with IE7. I usually create a separate IE7 only stylesheet.

I think you should use a CSS reset instead.

He is overly paranoid about cross browser differences. You do not need to do this.