Skinning(/Leatherworking)

I’m (finally) working on the new theme. It’s obviously a work-in-progress, so just appreciate the effort for now.

I’m starting with the default WordPress theme by Michael Heilemann. I’m not going to lie: I really dislike this particular theme.

The look, though bland, is fine. What bothers me is how disorganized and really horrid some of the code is, in particular the CSS. The text is realigned several times (center, no left, no center! Ah, you said center! But I meant left. Well… very well, we are Church of… Sorry, off to see Izzard in a few weeks). Everything is done in pixels, except randomly things are in ems or percents. Many things are changed from defaults only to be changed back later.

In general, the idea of cascading seems to have been missed.

I wonder, how much of this is one person (Mr. Heilemann) and how much is hacks by committee. There is a definite feeling of “too many chefs” here.

And yet, here I am, using it anyway. As I work through my changes I’m doing a bit of Spring Cleaning, aptly enough in Spring, but it slows down the process.

Mad props to Firebug, and its brilliant style inspector which shows you not only computed styles, but the whole CSS ancestry of any element.