Also, you shouldn't add divs at will because correct styling requires it. You are supposed to be able to style whatever the structure of a given page looks like with just CSS (this still isn't possible due to IE's crappy selector engine).
If you are willing to compromise on class names (grid_2), why are you not also willing to compromise on tag names (<table><tr><td>, even <font>)?
Again, playing devils advocate. It's not my intention to be trolling, but to discuss the issue and to illustrate my general dislike for these grid systems. I'm NOT advocating going back to soups of tables if it's only for better reusability of site components (which, again, is hampered by this grid_<number> nonsense)
Yes, in order to achieve certain goals, not because there is some absolute Platonic ideal correctness about it.
A question, then is does the pragmatic use of grids to more easily obtain certain layout goals end up making things worse in the long run.
Adherence to semantic purity may be a case of premature optimisation.
Not only that - the classes are as non-semantic as it gets.
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
How is better than (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)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.
This is why I'm not touching grid systems for my work, so if there is a class-attribute, then it usually has (aside of IE hacks due to .not.supporting.multiple.classes.selectors) semantic meaning.