Thank you for your reply Andrea.
What I mean by "normal", for the most part, is being able to see gridlines/cells in the table. They all just disappear when I use that wildcard CSS in my external stylesheet (or in internal styles for that matter).
If that way of zeroing-out everything (to make all browsers play the same) is outdated, then why is Killersites teaching us to do it that way?
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "things work" in your link. I only see a table without gridlines when I click on it.