What exactly does normalization in CSS do?

Question

I was trying some code with unordered lists in HTML on JSFiddle and I was irritated to death to find out that the bullets in the

won\'t show for no appar

Answer 1

“Normalization” in the sense used in jsfiddle means applying a set of CSS rules purported to clean things up. It is more often called “CSS reset”, and it is a debated technique. The important thing to realize that when overriding browser defaults, it may also override default rendering that has been with us from the dawn of the Web, such as default top and bottom margins and some indentation for ul elements—and the default list markers (bullets). This depends on the particular “normalization” style sheet use, on its aggressiveness.

The normalization described on the W3C page mentioned has nothing to do with this. It deals with Unicode normalization of characters, something that happens (when it happens) at the character level, a relatively theoretical issue.