I’m a day late and a dollar short, given that 10 years has passed and we’re now living with microformats2. While microformats are classes, they’re really meant for semantic mark up and NOTCSS styling. Perhaps the delineation wasn’t as specific a decade ago and it’s relatively common for designers to unwittingly style on microformats classes, but now with a more modern-facing web semantic mark up is much more sophisticated. Some web frameworks have code that easily allows microfomats classes to be injected into pre-existing code so that one doesn’t need to rewrite and restyle from the ground up. There are also an increasing number of people in the IndieWeb movement who are using microformats for some far more interesting functionality. Sadly, newer functionality like this can often break the display and operation of sites which rely on it (especially in cases like WordPress with thousands of sites which can inadvertently style on top of classes (hentry is a common example) and thereby cause lots of troubleshooting issues for unsuspecting users down the line.
Better modern practice would dictate a simple change: just add an additional class into the markup alongside your microformats to do the styling on the added class and not on the microformat class.
Chris Aldrich
I’m a day late and a dollar short, given that 10 years has passed and we’re now living with microformats2. While microformats are classes, they’re really meant for semantic mark up and NOT CSS styling. Perhaps the delineation wasn’t as specific a decade ago and it’s relatively common for designers to unwittingly style on microformats classes, but now with a more modern-facing web semantic mark up is much more sophisticated. Some web frameworks have code that easily allows microfomats classes to be injected into pre-existing code so that one doesn’t need to rewrite and restyle from the ground up. There are also an increasing number of people in the IndieWeb movement who are using microformats for some far more interesting functionality. Sadly, newer functionality like this can often break the display and operation of sites which rely on it (especially in cases like WordPress with thousands of sites which can inadvertently style on top of classes (hentry is a common example) and thereby cause lots of troubleshooting issues for unsuspecting users down the line.
Better modern practice would dictate a simple change: just add an additional class into the markup alongside your microformats to do the styling on the added class and not on the microformat class.