One way for a smarter approach is to reset the base CSS style. This will give you a clean slate to customize every element. It will also give you the step up on browser inconsistencies when it comes to design elements. A CSS Reset is designed to set a number of element styles to a specific baseline that creates consistency across various browsers. Not only do I want to strip off the padding and margins, but I also want all elements to have a consistent font size, weight, style, and family. For a good outline of this, see Eric Meyer's site and on six revisions . With CSS resets, you may be declaring much more than you might needed for a particular project to render things the way you want. In fact, I think pixel perfect precision across browsers is impractical, but if your like me then you really want extreme control of each and every element.

 

Another smart approach is to try a CSS framework  which starts by stripping everything down to build it back up again. Some CSS frameworks that I have look at are Blueprint css ,
Elements , WYWstyle ,  YUI Grids , Boilerplate , CleverCSS , ESWAT .