Looking at WordPress themes usually makes me cringe. It’s as if there was a memo on semantic markup and the community of WP developers didn’t get it.

Some themes waste kilobytes of HTML source on something that could be achieved with 75% less markup. Some use blatantly non-compliant code. Almost none use semantic names.

But what really irks me—I’ll cop to using meaningless code to make it look good—is the style of CSS that seems to be spreading: breaking up definitions into a half-dozen chunks, no line breaks, lack of organization. I think their heart is in the right place (a section for colors, so don’t have to worry about layout; a section for typography, so the precious padding is protected) but the result is a horrid mess.

I blame Michael Heilemann, the designer behind the bland and semantic-free default WordPress theme. I imagine theme developers, many just starting with HTML and CSS, started by looking at his code, and thought that was the way to do it. Then it spread like a virus.

Here’s an example from “Autumn Concept 1.0”:

topbar {background-color: #4b7c44;} #footer {background-color: #4b7c44;} #mainpicinner {height: 250px; background: « url(images/mainpic01.jpg) top left « no-repeat #fff; border: 1px solid #fff;} /* typography */ #logo a {color: #3a4032;} .textbkg {border-left: 4px solid #ebf0cf;}

(« is an inserted linebreak.)

Wow. Line breaks? Readability? Was this passed through a bad version of JSMin?

This is from the “Color Scheme” section, but the first directive for #mainpicinner is height. It also has a border, not just border-color but the whole thing. What’s the point of having sections if you proceed to ignore them immediately?

The rest is filled with classes like cols01 and box01 (while there are other cols##, there is no box02).

But that isn’t my real problem. My real problem is about 20 lines further down:

body {position: relative; background: #1f1f1f; « font: 70% Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, « sans-serif; text-align: center; letter-spacing: 0;} #container {float: left; display: block; width: 100%;} #topbar {float: left; display: block; width: « 100%; background-image: url(images/topbar.png); « background-position: top; background-repeat: « repeat-x; text-align: left; padding: 13px 0 6px 0;} #topbar div {padding-bottom: 0;}

container is back. (As are backgrounds. Pick a spot, already!)

This kind of CSS is hard to read, hard to maintain, and hard to customize. Even if the initial version is perfect—which doesn’t exist—things will start to break as soon as someone opens the file. Even in this published style sheet, the author couldn’t decide if background images and borders belonged in “Color Scheme” or “General Styles.” What chance does a maintainer have?

I am, admittedly, obsessively strict with my style sheets. I like to make very sure that every style affects only what I intend it to affect. But I never let the styles for one element single get broken into two places. Instead, what I try to do is keep similar styles in a similar order inside those blocks:

blockquote.dropquote { float: right; font-family: Arial, « Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 130%; color: #662020; background-color: #ddd; } div.login { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; font-size: 80%; color: #fff; }

Get the idea? Within each selector, I try to keep things in the same order. I almost always keep positioning styles first and then do either typography or color. To me, this is much more readable and maintainable. If my header div is 3 pixels too wide, I don’t have to comb through all the #header sections. I go to one place and fix it.

I like to extract the CSS order from the document order. This doesn’t necessarily stay complete or strict, especially when you have classes that can be used anywhere or you’re controlling tags directly. The header styles do come before the content styles, though, which come before the footer styles. That just makes sense.

Am I the only one who can’t stand this “style” of CSS? Do you use it? Why?