Last week, the clever folks at ZURB rolled out version 3.0 of their Foundation CSS framework, a competitor to Twitter's Bootstrap.

What struck me right away about ZURB's latest release is that it globally resets the W3C box model, a strategy Paul Irish proposed in a recent blog post. This means Foundation 3 offers no support for IE7.

Bootstrap also reverts to the traditional box model for its row-fluid layouts, adjusting widths and margins using a star hack to allow for IE7 support. But its fixed layouts still use the W3C model.

Personally, I'm a big fan of the box model reset strategy, and I know our backend team would be thrilledwhen they drop content into views, they use tables just to avoid all the arcana surrounding the W3C model. The traditional box model just makes sense.

Moreover, I'm excited by the prospect of developersspecifically, those who contribute to CSS frameworkshaving a hand in shaping the supported browser landscape. As nice as it's been to have major tech companies take an interest in this landscape, it's even better for us to take ownership of it.

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