Rikkert Koppes has some thoughts about class naming in HTML that’s a good read.
While working on www.att.com, Joe D’Andrea and I would spend a lot of time on naming, since Joe’s thought (and it was a good one) was that naming would crystallize the purpose of the construct, basically. So, instead of “columnleft” and “columnright” we opted for names that were more targeted to the content and structure: “sidebar” and “navigation,” for example. For the most part, I think we were successful (we still have a ways to go on a few things, of course, but that’s normal for us).
Rikkert is finding his model the same place we were looking: the newspaper. Since newspapers tend to deal in the same kind of content Web pages have, it seems like a good match. However, I think there’s a risk in propagating terminology that’s too obscure: if you have to explain the term constantly, it is probably a good idea to find another. But I like the idea of having some common set of classes, making stylesheets a little more portable. I’m somewhat surprised that there isn’t any consensus/collaboration on naming blog contructions, for one. Then I realized that you’d still have folks like me that want to use their own terminology, regardless of any group-think. :)
Newspaper Terminology Links
Some useful sites with newspaper terminology explained:
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