Lea de Groot wrote:
I do the same thing (.left, .right, etc) too.
I think it works, and only in very specific cases, because you *aren't*
going to change what these look like - you are far more likely to remove
the class.
I would personally question that would be true for the most part, the
whole idea of CSS is that you dont need to change the structure to
change the page itself. Structure is used to maintain relationships in
the content, while CSS is there to visualise that structure.
Very rarely do i ever need to remove a class or id (append to, but not
usually remove), in fact such such a well created css/xhtml combination
allowed me to change an old site of mine's look from a fixed width, high
graphic layout, to one that flexible and more in line with the current
"Web 2.0 type style... whatever that is".
From the maintainers mindset, normal semantic name choice says 'and
these types of items will have this look and feel (at this stage in the
lifecycle)' whereas in this case we are saying 'and images in this
position have a choice of A, B and C - change the ABC in the markup if
this changes'
I would agree that there are situations that you might the styles to be
so overtly obvious that their inflexible, such as perhaps a custom mini
CMS system that allows a client to add an image/text combo in certain
restricted combinations. These kinds of mini systems are generally
designed to not be altered style-wise (at least not altered in their
relative appearance), and yes, for absolute clarity using image.right,
image.left, p.full etc would (in my opinion) be suitable.
As I said though, the above types of systems are designed to be very
strict style-wise, whereas most sites are not so strict, and the
developer/designer etc has far more control over them (corporate
portals, blog sites etc). Having such inflexible identifiers within
these kinds of sites can be very counter intuitive in the long term,
especially as they are probably going to be worked on a) multiple times
during their lifetime and b) by more than one person (who may have
different ideas about layout etc than you originally had).
Basically there is no 100% right answer, and it is very dependant on the
project at hand, but the idea is to allow your identifies to match the
use of the system. If its going to be hand edited a little by
web-novices and isnt ever going to change in look, then use stricter
identifiers. However, if the longevity is unknown or the site is
designed to be worked on a great deal, then use identifiers that wont
"break" a few months down the line, otherwise the use off CSS will be
counter intuitive as not only will you then need to edit every class in
every html page to match its new purpose, you will also have to edit the
css to create this new class (which goes against the idea of
centralising your styles, reducing overheads).
Thanks,
David.
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