Welcome to Composing Layouts in React

Introduction

CSS in the Age of Components

What is Layout Composition? A React Layout Primitives Guide

Encapsulated CSS - How to Apply CSS in a Composable Way

Normal Document Flow in HTML, CSS, and React

CSS Grid vs Flexbox for Composable Layouts

How to Add a CSS Reset to Remove Default Browser Style

Composable Layouts

What are Layout Spacers?

How to Build a Stacked Component Layout in React

How to Build a Split Pane Layout in React

How to Build React Grid Layouts With Custom Column Numbers

How to Build a React Responsive Grid Layout

How to Build Responsive React Text Elements With InlineCluster

How to Add Inline Styling to React Components

Layout Primitives - The Spacers

Introduction to Layout Wrapper Primitives

How to Build a Pricing Page Widget in React With PadBox

Automatically Center Text DIVs with React Center Component

Resize Images And Maintain Aspect Ratio in React and CSS

How to Vertically Center a DIV in React With CSS

How to Build Accessible Navigation Divs in React

Layout Primitives - The Wrappers

Introduction to The Settings Pages

How to Build a React Navbar With a Menu and Header

How to Build a React Sidebar Menu

How to Build a Profile Settings Page in React

How to Build a Privacy Page with Toggle Buttons in React

Composing Layouts in Practice

CSS layout has grown and evolved into a robust set of tools to accomplish some fantastic modern layouts.
The problem is that we are still teaching CSS as something that is" hacked" together by using" tricks" to get our desired web layouts.
Learning CSS like this typically leads us down one of two paths: We either build fragile page layouts using 
the "see what sticks" method of CSS, or we give up and declare that CSS is too tricky and bring in an X column grid system like Twitter Bootstrap.

Creating page layouts in CSS doesn't have to be complicated. Like how you make much of your everyday speech using just a small 
subset of vocabulary composed together, you can achieve sophisticated layouts by composing simple low-level layout primitives in unique ways.

In this course, you will learn foundational layout primitives that you can use to build many of your more complex layouts. You will also learn 
how to apply the principle of "Encapsulated CSS" to both extend these primitives as well as to create custom layout primitives. To do this, we 
will recreate many of the layouts found in the wild using the principles mentioned above.

This course does not require extensive knowledge of CSS. It does assume that you have a basic understanding of the CSS box model, CSS specificity, 
CSS selectors, and CSS sizing units. Though you can apply the principles in this course to any modern web framework, including no framework 
development, this course will be using React and assume you have a basic understanding of React, JSX, and React hooks.

Composing Layout in React is for both novice and experienced developers who want to take their layout skills to the next level. This course will 
teach you the practical skills you need to build modern layouts for the web without depending on heavy CSS frameworks. Unlike courses and blog 
posts that teach each layout property in isolation, our product teaches practical layout patterns that you can use every day when solving your 
layout challenges.

In this course we show you how to build complex layouts in React by composing just a few foundational layout primitives.
Along the way you will learn modern CSS Layout tools like Normal Flow, Flexbox, and Grid.

Composing Layouts in React

What it means to compose layouts and why you should do it

How to apply the principles of Encapsualted CSS in our React components

The foundational layout primitives that every developer should know

The styles that we write are not the first styles that get applied to our app. Before a single line of our CSS is used, the browsers will apply their user-agent style sheets. Unfortunately, there is no rule that requires any of the browsers to use the same style sheet for their user-agent. For this reason, CSS Resets have been a valuable tool to help developers provide consistent styling on the web.

A CSS Reset is nothing more than a style sheet you bring in before the rest of your app's styles, either as a separate style sheet or tagged onto the beginning of your style sheet. This style sheet's goal is simply to provide a base from which you can consistently apply CSS across browsers. Some resets are aggressive and remove all styles from all elements. Others try to "normalize" all the user-agent style sheets of the various browsers.

Luckily, there is currently less inconsistency across the browsers than would justify aggressive resets. Still, from a layout perspective, there is a need to override the browser default styles to make compositional layout possible. It makes sense to look at what you need to reset in the browser's user-agent style sheets to achieve this goal.

In this lesson, we will only be going over layout-specific Resets, but if you would like to look at the complete Reset that I use, you can check out the entire CSS Reset at 

 property on all elements and pseudo elements to 

*,
*::before,
*::after {
  box-sizing: border-box;
}

 on all elements and pseudo-elements allows for a more intuitive developer experience since the size of the element will be calculated from border to border instead of the default, which is content + padding + border.

After that, we remove any margins from all the elements.

body,
h1,
h2,
h3,
h4,
p,
ul,
ol,
li,
figure,
figcaption,
blockquote,
dl,
dd {
  margin: 0;
}

Doing this allows elements to conform to the first principle of encapsulation: Elements do not set their position, size, or margin.

---
title: How to Add a CSS Reset to Remove Default Browser Style
slug: css-reset
description: In this lesson you will learn how to reset the default browser styles so that they follow Encapsulated CSS.
isPublicLesson: false
privateVideoUrl: https://fullstack.wistia.com/medias/93xtl5noc0
useMdx: true
---

The styles that we write are not the first styles that get applied to our app. Before a single line of our CSS is used, the browsers will apply their user-agent style sheets. Unfortunately, there is no rule that requires any of the browsers to use the same style sheet for their user-agent. For this reason, CSS Resets have been a valuable tool to help developers provide consistent styling on the web.

## What is a CSS Reset?

A CSS Reset is nothing more than a style sheet you bring in before the rest of your app's styles, either as a separate style sheet or tagged onto the beginning of your style sheet. This style sheet's goal is simply to provide a base from which you can consistently apply CSS across browsers. Some resets are aggressive and remove all styles from all elements. Others try to "normalize" all the user-agent style sheets of the various browsers.

Luckily, there is currently less inconsistency across the browsers than would justify aggressive resets. Still, from a layout perspective, there is a need to override the browser default styles to make compositional layout possible. It makes sense to look at what you need to reset in the browser's user-agent style sheets to achieve this goal.

## How to reset for composable layouts

In this lesson, we will only be going over layout-specific Resets, but if you would like to look at the complete Reset that I use, you can check out the entire CSS Reset at [Bedrock Layout Primitives](https://github.com/Bedrock-Layouts/Bedrock/blob/master/packages/css-reset/src/reset.css).

The first thing to set is the `box-sizing` property on all elements and pseudo elements to `border-box`:

```css { actualFilename=./protected/encapsulated-reset.css endLine=5 startLine=1 url=https&#x3A;//gitlab.com/fullstackio/books/composing-layouts-in-react/module_01/lesson_01.05/protected/encapsulated-reset.css }
*,
*::before,
*::after {
  box-sizing: border-box;
}
```

Setting the `box-sizing` property to `border-box` on all elements and pseudo-elements allows for a more intuitive developer experience since the size of the element will be calculated from border to border instead of the default, which is content + padding + border.

After that, we remove any margins from all the elements.

In this lesson you will learn how to reset the default browser styles so that they follow Encapsulated CSS.

Learn

The newline Guide to Building Your First GraphQL Server with Node and TypeScript

Teach

Amelia Wattenberger

Author of Fullstack D3

Community

Composing Layouts in React

Module 1: Introduction

Introduction:

Start Here

Introduction: (2:30)

Welcome to Composing Layouts in React

Module 2: Composable Layouts

Lesson 1: (2:14)

CSS in the Age of Components

Lesson 2: (5:33)

What is Layout Composition? A React Layout Primitives Guide

Lesson 3: (8:53)

Encapsulated CSS - How to Apply CSS in a Composable Way

Lesson 4: (8:42)

Normal Document Flow in HTML, CSS, and React

Lesson 5: (6:27)

CSS Grid vs Flexbox for Composable Layouts

Lesson 6: (5:40)

How to Add a CSS Reset to Remove Default Browser Style

Module 3: Layout Primitives - The Spacers

Lesson 1: (2:02)

What are Layout Spacers?

Lesson 2: (17:07)

How to Build a Stacked Component Layout in React

Lesson 3: (14:21)

How to Build a Split Pane Layout in React

Lesson 4: (18:25)

How to Build React Grid Layouts With Custom Column Numbers

Lesson 5: (11:04)

How to Build a React Responsive Grid Layout

Lesson 6: (12:27)

How to Build Responsive React Text Elements With InlineCluster

Lesson 7: (23:22)

How to Add Inline Styling to React Components

Module 4: Layout Primitives - The Wrappers

Lesson 1: (2:39)

Introduction to Layout Wrapper Primitives

Lesson 2: (13:44)

How to Build a Pricing Page Widget in React With PadBox

Lesson 3: (14:27)

Automatically Center Text DIVs with React Center Component

Lesson 4: (19:59)

Resize Images And Maintain Aspect Ratio in React and CSS

Lesson 5: (17:14)

How to Vertically Center a DIV in React With CSS

Lesson 6: (8:54)

How to Build Accessible Navigation Divs in React

Module 5: Composing Layouts in Practice

Lesson 1: (1:32)

Introduction to The Settings Pages

Lesson 2: (24:10)

How to Build a React Navbar With a Menu and Header

Lesson 3: (16:17)

How to Build a React Sidebar Menu

Lesson 4: (20:05)

How to Build a Profile Settings Page in React

Lesson 5: (14:05)

How to Build a Privacy Page with Toggle Buttons in React

How to Add a CSS Reset to Remove Default Browser Style