I thought one of the main goals of CSS was to separate data from presentation. Isn’t this sneaking presentation back into data?
A. This is a quite commonly expressed objection to the way microformats uses class, but it’s based on a misunderstanding of the way the class attribute in HTML was designed. Yes, class is very commonly,and appropriately used by web designers in conjunction with CSS to style pages, and in truth, it is often overused for that, but despite this, class, according to the HTML specification “has several roles in HTML”, including “for general purpose processing by user agents”. Microformats utilize this second aspect of the class (and id) attribute, and do so legitimately. It is not an abuse of the class or id attribute to use it to add semantic context to a document. Nor is the use of class in and of itself presentational – in fact, it is an important mechanism for separating presentation from structured content.
