I was just reading a blog post about a new change in 4.6 and after commenting on it, I thought it may be a good topic for discussion.

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryID/1569/Default.aspx

My comments are:

It seems very ambiguous to me to set a class called .DNNAlignright with a property of text-align:left 
In general it is never a good idea to name a CSS selector to indicate the properties that the selectors may (or may not) contain.
In other words it is bad practice in CSS to have a class selector named with a color, or a size, etc.

Since this is an end-user defined value, I think it should take precedence over the skin design and would have been better to use the inline css IMO. The skin design comes first, but the end user will have the last say in how they want the settings to affect their site. 

I hope that adding more and more specific css selectors to default.css will not continue since it is already very bloated. 
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I'm interested to hear other opinions on this.

Well, I think you can argue for both options, but I think inline CSS would have caused a lot of problems.

It would have changed the align for all RTL websites to left after an upgrade.

Also in a corporate environments it's important to have the possibility to restrain the admins layout options and since there is currently no way to switch the module align setting off, forcing alignment from the skin is the best option IMO.

I agree having .DNNAlignright with a property of text-align:left  seems strange on the other hand a class name like DNNDefaultalign would be very unclear too.

At least it's clear you are overruling the default DNN align.

By the way we did consult some RTL users and this lead to the conclusion that inline styles was "not a good idea"...

I think we should make the "Not Specified" option default by the way.

And default.css, well that's another story.

I agree it's bloated but IMO this was the best solution.

John

The problem is that all existing modules have a default aling set to left (you couldn't set "no aling")
Previously for RTL sites this was solved by overwriting this (globally) using CSS in their skin (where they loose the align functionality)
If we would have introduced inline CSS that would fail and all existing modules would have align left (because inline CSS overrules everything)

By the way, other then default.css being bloated I really don't see any real problem in this solution.
There is no functional change IMO.
If your skinner forced all align to left while you don't want that, force him to change it or hire somebody else.