[wp-hackers] WP Theme Directory Submission Restrictions

[Otto]

On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 9:58 AM, Joost de Valk <joost at joostdevalk.nl> wrote:
> Otto,
>
> While I agree with most of what you're saying, I don't think it's wise to
> set that all in stone, restrictions aren't the best thing to boost
> creativity :-)

Some kinds of creativity should be suppressed. I don't want my
mechanic getting all creative when fixing my car engine, nor do I want
my plumber getting creative while running my shower lines... And I
don't want my WordPress themes to be all creative about where the
styles go.

I mean, you must have a style.css file, in much the same way that
WordPress requires specific naming for many other files. Does that
also suppress creativity?

I ask somebody, anybody, to present a valid use case for not having
these mandatory styles (and they ARE mandatory, in the sense that your
theme is broken in 2.5 and up if you don't have them) in the style.css
file. There's only about 8 of them, you could stick them at the end of
the style.css file, after your @import lines (which are also, in
themselves, evil) if you wanted to. Why keep them separate? What,
exactly, is the advantage to that? If your theme is worth it's salt,
then those styles are different for each theme anyway, so there's not
going to be a whole lot of code reuse going on.

Which is true in general, really. CSS doesn't see a lot of code reuse
if you're doing it properly. The whole point of moving styling out
into the CSS is that the HTML becomes semantic. You're not supposed to
use "alignright" and "centered" classes in HTML, really, because
you're supposed to define things as what they actually are (post,
title, etc), and let the CSS handle the styling. The only reason we're
using these non-semantic classes in WordPress is that we have to
signal the theme what the users selection was from the editor, in
order to let the theme handle the styling correctly, and these are
easy to understand and deal with.

So if you're defining things semantically in your own themes, there's
not going to be a heck of a lot of code reuse. And if you're using
tricks and hacks for CSS on a regular basis, then you're doing it
wrong anyway, no?

That's just my opinion, of course. Sorry for the mini-rant. :)

-Otto