According to its author, sanitize.css renders elements consistently across browsers by styling with today’s best practices. CSS inheritance is assigned universally so that styles cascade naturally and consistently, and wherever possible, allow the box model to operate more intuitively — with every normalization and opinionated default carefully documented.
Based upon reset.css and its ability to resolve frustrating inconsistencies between browsers by giving them all the same empty canvas, as well as normalize.css, which keeps styles to the bare minimum to keep every browser looking the same, and when in doubt, following the standard, Sanitize contains the baseline styles that many coders end up writing.
“I don’t need to hurt my brain calculating the combined values of padding and width. I don’t have to remember that having no border style eliminates the border width,” Sanitize’s author notes. “[Sanitize] gives me a way to fix the box model and the border [and] gives me a way to define the baseline that I need most of the time.”