> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andy Budd
[snip]
> Whereas I can see a good reason to use semantic HTML, is there really
> much point in worrying if your ID's/classes have semantic meaning.
> Becasue they are user defined, there probably is never going to be a
> time when that information will be used by another machine.
I haven't read the article in question yet, but this just caught my eye...
A fair point, but in my mind it makes sense to still keep IDs/classes semantic,
mainly for your own sake as a developer, and to make things easier to maintain
in future.
An example: when I first started in this job, I went through all the code
left by my predecessor. She had obviously dabbled with CSS, but obviously not
understood the idea of separation of content and presentation at all, leading to
wonderful things like
<a href="blah.html" class="redlink">blah</a>
with
.redlink { color: red; }
This was all fine and dandy...until the corporate identity guidelines changed and
all links needed to be make green instead of red. As a quick fix, I did
.redlink { color: green; }
Great...so now I had a class "redlink" making things green. Intuitive...
I ended up simplifying the entire CSS anyway, removing the need for any such classes
in most cases, but if I hadn't, I would have had to go through the entire site and
find/replace redlink with greenlink or something as well...
Same with things like "floatLeft"...what if you later decide that you don't want
to float it at all? Heck, even "col1" does imply that it's one of many columns...what
if
you later redo the whole CSS and the whole block is on its own, i.e. not a column
anymore?
As always, every web developer needs to get a clear idea of how far down the
"eradication
of presentational markup and IDs/classnames" they want to go. Often I do make hard and
fast
calls about certain class names, for instance, when I know that a page is only going
to be
needed for a few months or something. For longer term pages and site sections, I try a
bit
harder to keep the content as presentation-agnostic as possible, classnames and all...
My GBP0.02 anyway,
Patrick
p.s.: and now I'll go off and read the article, to see if I'm now wildly off topic
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
Webmaster / University of Salford
http://www.salford.ac.uk
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