How to make padding:auto work in CSS?

Question

I am working on a legacy project that has CSS Reset with *{ margin:0; padding:0 } applied to everything. Now, my new code doesn't need that as it relies on Normalize.css. This hasn't been much of a problem but at some places I need to use both styles.

How do I unreset my CSS? I have been able to do *{margin:auto} which works fine. The same isn't true about padding. Is there an equivalent way to reset the padding. How do you go about solving this?

Answer 1

auto is not a valid value for padding property, the only thing you can do is take out padding: 0; from the * declaration, else simply assign padding to respective property block.

If you remove padding: 0; from * {} than browser will apply default styles to your elements which will give you unexpected cross browser positioning offsets by few pixels, so it is better to assign padding: 0; using * and than if you want to override the padding, simply use another rule like

.container p {    padding: 5px; }