Per: Thanks for the detailed reply. Nice website for 'Mingas' by the way.

I'm a programmer / system developer / development strategist by training and trade, but only stuck my nose into CSS about 18 months ago when I took over responsibility for our film festival's website mentioned above. My experience thus is limited and I'm all ears reading your comment. I would explain my approach in the following way:
1. I believe that the vast proportion of web pages on the web are are 'look' rather than 'read' content. The 'index.htm' page, our home page at our web site is very much of that ilk. It shows our schedule in our season and presents a quick compact view of that schedule which can be expanded, by film, if the visitor wants more. At the compact level, and when one reads about a film there are many semantic elements and I want our visitor to be able to quickly scan across those elements [event; film; guest speaker; director; film clips and trailers; actors; references to other films; the reviewer; etc.]
I've assigned classes to most if not all of these semantic elements and scoped the assignment to the element level at which they would/should be used.
So, 'span.withCast' is defined, to be used when the cast of a movie is provided. ...and 'span.FilmOptions' when trailer or clip or full movie viewing options are provided.
I've done similar assignments at the level of the 'div' element and your comments and those of Inger have caused me to reassess why I did that and whether that was appropriate.

2. Regarding use of mixed capitalization, this is no doubt a reflection of my programming background and the long history of 'naming convention wars'. I have come down on the side of descriptive names, with words demarcated by a starting capital (most times) rather than underscores or hyphens. I recognize the risk of losig style assignment by miscapitalizing, but with editors like CoffeeCup it's very easy to control / correct that.

I'm very keen to read your counter-arguments. Tell me what I'm missing and whatever problems I may be unknowingly creating for myself.

Meanwhile, I've sent an email off to CoffeeCup supprt with my question. When I get an answer, I'll post it here.

On a related point, I've been exploring what tools are available to help one control libraries of CSS files and correct redundancy and eliminate unused assignments. What tools do you (and others!) use and like - especially free ones. Grosso modo, I've been looking at Google Chrome's Developer tools and they are some help. www.cinegaelmontreal.com is the website I'm managing

Not quite sure if I understand exactly what you mean here. But to me '...redundancy and eliminate unused assignments...' means code or markup that you have in your files, but don't use. I have been looking for a way to quickly nuke them too, but have ended up doing it manually. The reason for that is that I don't have any huge sites, and I write all my css and html myself (by means of the HTML Editor, that is), so I know exactly what I want to have in there.

I guess it comes down to how much time you've got on your hands to create a site/page. If you are using some sort of template, the work can be completed faster, but you risk leaving unused code in the files. Ready made templates (e.g. from Coffeecup, Artisteer or any other template producer) have to cover all the eventualities, and you usually end up with having a lot of stuff that you don't use.
On the other hand, making your own templates means that you can add in what you need, no more, no less, but the process will take longer. And maybe later you find you want some blockcode or whatever, which you didn't think of earlier, so then you'll have to add that to the files.

Antoine,

Hard as I tried finding counter-arguments, I am coming up short. I pretty much agree with what you are saying. I think your emphasis on semantic organization is well placed. Of course, this also happens to coincide with significant parts of the additions that came with HTML5, so you are in good company!

I would also agree with your efforts to use descriptive names and labels. If that involves upper and lower case letter, then so be it... Using lower case letters consistently is just one of my simplifying rules of thumb that I use to keep myself out of trouble. That way I don't have to remember if I use HTML (anything goes) or XHTML (strictly lower case), or whether something will be parsed at server level (case sensitive) or at browser level (not so much...)

My comments earlier were really only my musings - or my 'thinking aloud' - about what differences there may be in our approaches that made you see those shortcomings in the class-selection dropdowns that I don't seem to experience. Your post motivated Inger also to bring the question up with the Coffeecup people, so I guess we'll see what they come up with in response to you as well as to her.

Best of luck!