I see the temptation with using a grid like css system as it gives you really great control over the layout. On the other hand I really despise the classitis that's being enforced on a user of any grid system.<p>Not only that - the classes are as non-semantic as it gets.<p>Is this really where we should be going? Now that we got rid of non-sematic markup and heaps of tables and spacer images? Now we are going back to<p><pre><code> <div class="grid_2">
</code></pre>
How is<p><pre><code> <fieldset class="container_12">
<div class="grid_2"><button type="submit">Button 1</button></div>
<div class="grid_8"><button type="submit">Button 2</button></div>
<div class="grid_2"><button type="submit">Button 3</button></div>
</fieldset>
</code></pre>
better than<p><pre><code> <table width="120"><tr>
<td width="20%"><button /></td>
<td width="60%"><button /></td>
<td width="20%"><button /></td>
</tr></table>
</code></pre>
(of course, playing devil's advocate a bit. fieldset > div > button is more semantic than table > tr > td > button, but it's far away from perfect)<p>Now if we had something like SASS where we could say that #sidebar is to be rendered as .grid_2, yeah - better, but as long as SASS is just something we bolt on as a compiler on deployment time, the code we are throwing at the browser is just as ugly as the code we threw at the browser in the dark ages.<p>This is why I'm not touching grid systems for my work, so if there <i>is</i> a class-attribute, then it usually has (aside of IE hacks due to .not.supporting.multiple.classes.selectors) semantic meaning.