Gabriel Wicke wrote:
The idea behind the heavy use of css was mainly to avoid having many
templates, and to have a mainly structural xhtml that's as decoupled as
possible from the actual appearance. Makes maintanance probably a bit
easier and helps with future improvements to the caching system.
While I applaud your efforts to de-couple, as you say, the document
structure (XHTML) from the layout (CSS), I don't agree that we should
expect, or even encourage, future skin designers from re-using the same
XHTML. I can't speak for others, but I at least find it incredibly hard
to make a website look the way I want with just CSS. For example, your
XHTML pretty much hard-codes the category box to be at the bottom of
articles; to move it up requires JavaScript, which can get extremely
messy if you want to move loads of objects around and not just one. Not
to mention wanting to move it outside the article div (turn it into a
portlet, say).
I fear that skin designers would be tempted to simply
modify the xml if
it was mandatory to add a per-skin template anyway.
Nothing should stop them from doing so if they so wish.
But then, the caching scheme isn't implemented
yet, so it doesn't matter
that much currently. Could be hard to reverse though.
In that case, I'll object to any change that would require skins to use
the same XHTML ;-)
Timwi