Is using 4 white rectangles really the best way to crop something in Ai?

Question

I'm sure someone here has used this technique before.
(And in InDesign as well)...
You are drawing a new image and there is extra color or
drawn detail that extends past the border(s)... but because Ai does not
have a "crop" tool for the document "canvas" or the vector frames themselves, you draw four opaque white (same color as the document white) rectangles and move them onto each side of the image (up to it's border).
Then, you fuse or flatten those four rectangles somehow.
My questions are:
1) If this the proper technique, is Pathfinder the right tool?
2) If it is not the proper technique for cropping, what is? Is there a way similar to how Ps crops? It seems that the crop tool in Ai is geared towards the printing process only.

Answer 1

I find that using a clipping mask for a drawing (making a mask on the top layer then masking everything) moves everything to the top layer, which is not useful for art that may get edited further later. Clipping just the objects that extend past the border, on its layer (Kurt and Ray) is something I hadn't thought of; it would preserve most of your art on the desired layers.
I tend to use white boxes on the edges of my maps if the art doesn't extend too far beyond the borders. But clipping masks do make a neater graphic (the 0,0 of the art pops up right at the edge of the InDesign/Quark picture box, which designers appreciate). FreeHand generally remembers layers for objects once you unmask them, so I mask more in FreeHand than AI.
On a related point - when I bring in old FreeHand art to Illustrator CS4, type on paths gets positioned badly. Usually the handles on the baseline just get shifted so one word disappears, but recently I've been finding the left and right handles are stacked right on top of each other. It's necessary (once I get the handles to APPEAR) to select the TOP of the handle to shift the pair of handles to the right, then I can grab at the BOTTOM of the pair of handles to slide the left-hand handle so the type appears and I can position it.
The problem I run into is that certain of these steps require the white cursor, and certain steps require the black cursor, and there's no way to use the black cursor on a MASKED drawing without selecting all of it (whereas in FreeHand you can switch cursors on a subselected object in a group or mask, and edit its handles, move the type along the baseline, etc). So several times the only way to grab the offending type is to unmask the art, adjust the text, then re-mask. I may be doing something wrong, however it's quite possible it's just another Adobeism I'm going to have to work around.