[droob]

We need a better word for this than "semantic". We're just passing the complexity back and forth between the HTML and the CSS, and the only "semantics" or meaning that arise are to the author/editor. Users don't care, machines don't care, and I've never, ever seen a large-scale site design that doesn't involve some reworking of both the HTML and the CSS.

[giulianob]

Exactly. I think web devs want to believe that their HTML is purely content and CSS should fully drive appearance but that's never the case. It makes sense to create classes when you can come up with patterns and want to make sure that you aren't repeating yourself everywhere but simply moving the grid system into CSS just adds an extra layer of abstraction that makes it more difficult to read. Also, CSS doesn't support mixins (yet) so you end up with a lot more generated CSS than if you just use the classes.

[mcgwiz]

Fair point. "Abstract" might be better. It embodies the information-/implementation-hiding goal of this technique.

Abstractions still require names, and the names should be meaningful (not easy: "naming things is one of the hardest things to do in software development"), at least to the development team (hate to keep rattling off platitudes, but "you should write code for humans first, computers second"). Rather than "semantic", "descriptive" seems to fit the bill.

"Abstract and descriptive". Doesn't quite roll off the tongue, but I tried :)

[mgr86]

I was at Balisage this summer, a markup conference (XML). The opening talk was on semantics. The summary basically read, what the hell does this word even mean anyway.

(paper - http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol10/html/Usdin01/Balis...)

[rubiquity]

That's because you aren't blind.

[droob]

In this case we're not talking about ARIA or native elements vs. styled ones, though, we're talking about CSS classes.