Usability Review: Links in DotNetNuke

Many web visitors know what a link does on a web page. For web developers and designers, links can perform certain actions in different context; however, it still is going to look like a link to end-users. Pre-defining the CSS selectors (doing the designer's job) on certain links in DotNetNuke framework or any CMS for that matter is not necessary. Sometimes it can cause some additional work for others.

In DotNetNuke, there are CSS selectors called SkinObject and CommandButton. These two selectors are essential parts of DotNetNuke links to define the look and feel. It is kinda self-expalined that if you want to style the links for any skin objects, you'd find the SkinObject selector and override it in your skin.css file. The same technique goes with CommandButton, but you need to identify which link in the framework that uses SkinObject and which one that uses CommandButton.

Anyway, I think these two selectors are not necessary needed as most designers would define their overall look and feel of links throughout a web site at the initial stage of development.

The best practice is to deliver a consistent (and recognizable) color for links throughout the site. Therefore, when starting any project, a web designer will define some global elements (i.e. h1, h2, a, blockquote…) and reuse them across the site. When working with DotNetNuke, it takes a bit more time to style SkinObject and CommandButton selectors to be consistent with the rest of the site. Since these links have the exact look and feel, there is no need for the browser to render the additional markup when it loads. If a designer needs to style a certain link to have different design, she still has the ability to do so by adding her own selector the wrapper element and define her own styles as needed.

What do you think? Is there a need for the existence of SkinObject and CommandButton selectors in DotNetNuke framework? I personally don't.