Question

I see this being done on websites (ex: http://www.abookapart.com/):

.left {
  float: left;
}

<div class="col two left" />

Is the above good practice? I thought it was generally frowned upon to create classes that describe style. If I wanted the above div to float right at a later date I would have to go into the markup and change left to right. No better then adding a style attribute to the element it would seem.

Answer 1

You’re right. Most developers avoid class names like “left” or “blue” for that exact reason. Other than the class name, I don’t see anything wrong. I would include that float in the “col” class and then just override it with “right” later on if need be.