This is a draft "webmaster tip", under work and review by the Quality Assurance Team, and shouldn't be considered as an official tip from W3C while it remains a draft.
Often people use class names like bluetext, or
redborder. A much better way to name your classes is with
the role a certain HTML element of that class has.
Think about why you want something to look a certain way, and not really about how it should look. Looks can always change, but the reasons for giving something a look stay the same.
warning, important,
downloadableImage and submenu
are all good names. They describe what a certain element
represents, and they are not likely to change. A warning will
always remain a warning, no matter how much the look of the page
changes.border4px, lighttext and
prettybackground are examples of bad names. You might
fatten that border to a whopping 5 pixels, or the background may
look pretty old after a while, and not pretty at all. An advantage
of using CSS is that you won't have to change much in order to
change the looks of your website. If you have to change all light
text into dark text, and thus change all classes
lighttext to darktext in all
your HTML pages, you're likely to miss a few.
Created Date: 2004-03-08 by Sybren Stüvel