[wp-hackers] WP Theme Directory Submission Restrictions

[Doug Stewart]

On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 11:17 AM, Otto <otto at ottodestruct.com> wrote:
> 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?
>

No, it's not suppressive.  Mandating that all non-required CSS styles
exist in your single style.css IS suppressive.

> 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.
>

Perhaps.  However, many of my themes use styling that is fairly
similar, thus it would be nice to reuse those styles without having to
hand update per-theme.  And let's not forget about Child Themes...

> Which is true in general, really. CSS doesn't see a lot of code reuse
> if you're doing it properly.

Not true.  Please see Blueprint, YUI, et al. for explicit
contradiction of your statement.

> 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.
>

I don't agree.  The class names are certainly named after their
intended layout purpose, but you can put lie to their actual meaning
by, say, defining .alignright's float: property to "left".  The class
names are simply that -- class names.  They're used as a cheap hack at
the moment to allow users some sort of WYSIWYG functionality.

> 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?
>

Simply not true. I have a reset.css that I use time and again to reset
all the standard HTML entities' properties back to a base level that
then gives me explicit control over every pad, float, clear, margin,
border, etc.

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

What would we talk about if we didn't have disagreements?  *grin*

-- 
-Doug