Probably just a simple oversite on your part. I’m sure Roy is as eager to accept your apology (the one I’m sure that you are most willing to extend) as you are to tell your colleagues in the web development community about the valuable lesson you’ve learned about declarative classes and the power of css preprocessors. Good Luck!

That said, certain presentational classes like .button may prove useful to those listening. I just haven’t run into a situation yet that forced me to not use semantic class names. Full disclosure here, I haven’t worked in the development of large sites with multiple developer but after read this article I can see how presentational classes can be helpful in that situation.

Now I know truly semantic classes go unnoticed by most users and that in itself could be an argument for presentational all on its own. But if we are trying to achieve universal sharing of content then isn’t semantics, markup and class names, an important step in that directions. While it’s true that semantic class names have no intrinsic meaning to the screen readers themselves, they certainly will to the person listening to the screen reader.

The definition of semantic is “Of or relating to meaning, especially meaning in language.” according to The Free Dictionary. So if semantics were meant to make developers lives easier the presentational classes would be fine. If on the other hand it was meant to improve understanding of content by the users then presentational classes leave something to be desired.

I guess my question then is, who were semantics envisioned to help? Developers or users?

Going by what you say, if we had two headings we could end up with H2 being bigger than H1 and taking visual weight. Which of course semantically is clearly wrong. But you say styling changes can only be made using the CSS…

Sorry, but that is just nonsensical, and horribly bad practise.

It is not that bad, but learning a preprocessor is not a bad idea at all. You should consider it instead of having a hell of classnames in the html.

It’s easy to make up best practice rules with language like never and always… but in practice, especially on a large scale or complex design you’ll always end up making exceptions.

. You can never use “best practice” blindly and be certain it’s the best choice every time, you always have to consider your situation. People never seem to realize that there are no silver bullets.

Who says you should ONLY change a CSS file? In this case if I need to change the layout what’s easier, changing the class on the HTML element or coming up with new CSS in the stylesheet for each class (or worse if I’m doing it “semantically”–having to rearrange a bunch of CSS selectors when I already have a class that defines the style I need. II’m not advocating color and font classes but all semantics all the time just for semantics’ sake is just as ridiculous.