Is it bad practice to assign a css class for the sole purpose of finding it with jQuery?

I'm using ASP.NET, not the newes开发者_StackOverflow中文版t one with that clientIdMode stuff. So, the control ids are generated and funky.

There are lots of ways of passing ids around, but lately I've been assigning a 'fake' css class to the control I'm interested in. Then in a js file I use jQuery to find the control.

Is this bad practice? It seems a lot like the ajaxControlToolkit's behaviorId to me... Is the behaviorId bad practice as well?

It's a great way to do things; I've done this plenty. The auto-generated IDs suck, although if you leave the runat="server" off, you can use those too. (I know it's not always an option, but for when it is an option, you can do so).

CSS classes are used to describe an element. Using a class to describe an element so that you can ientify it later is exactly what it was designed for. For this reason I would argue that it is the right thing to do.

CSS classes are good. ASP.net classes are bad.

What I do is prepend js_ to any of my Javascript only CSS classes so I don't get confused later.