Clarification Re: paragraph without CSS styles

First, I just finished watching your InDesign tutorial series, and it convinced me to subscribe to Lynda.com. I took notes on the videos and am now going back and reviewing some of my questions…and this is the first one…

Did you say in one of the videos that allowing html elements without CSS classes is a bad practice?

I would like to follow a three-step process in styling my paragraphs, as follows:

1. All paragraph tags have no classes assigned by default. They will simply be styled with a CSS rule in the style sheet that looks something like this:

p { indent: 15px; }

2. Paragraph tags in the Appendix will be styled a little differently. However, they still won’t have a class; they will simply be placed inside special div’s. The style sheet will then include a second rule:

div.footnote p { indent: 0; etc. }

3. Any paragraphs that require special styling will then be assigned classes, and appropriate styles will be added to the style sheet as needed.

To ask my question another way, is what I described a good practice, or is it a bad practice to include paragraph tags without CSS classes (as you may have commented on in one of the videos).

I also have one similar question: My content will certainly include bold and italicized text. Is it OK to use conventional tags – [b] [em] – or do I have to use styles to accomplish this? Again, I’m a little confused, because I have something in my notes about using CSS styles instead of bold/italics tags. But I can’t remember exactly where in which video I might have heard that.

Thanks!