Of course, it is really hard to think of descriptive names which avoid
presentational character, but surely we all agree that names should help
readability of markup (in most cases anyway :-) ?
I strive for readability myself (now, don't go poking around my sites to prove me wrong!), to to point where I don't think it's reasonable to pull comments and whitespace out of a file before delivered just to save some bandwidth.
But your point about appropriate names is exactly why you should use meaningful names, not presentational names. I have literally encountered dozens of sites where the class="smallOrangeLinks" were not small, nor orange, nor even links in some cases -- the original coder just saw some small orange text in the mock-up and applied the class.
Similarly, what happens when your lefcol becomes the center? Or two generations of coders down the line, a new page gets designed and the coder applies leftcol to the wide navigation there because it seemed to look right and was easier than defining a new class?
How much more confusing would that be than if you named it PrimaryContent all along?
Yes, you can go too far and you should watch for that, but I think the first instinct of most people is not far enough.
--
Ben Curtis : webwright
bivia : a personal web studio
http://www.bivia.com
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