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The dictionary is caving and listing “literally” as meaning “actually”, “in effect” or “virtually” along with the original meaning and I completely resent this caving.

Militant wing of Toastmasters, rise up! (don’t tell me there isn’t a militant wing of Toastmasters I know there is you’all are just hiding it).

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Sweet! The Supreme court is going to hear Google V. Oracle, in which Oracle is trying to claim they can copyright the Java APIs which are necessary for Android among other things to run. Hoping the nerds win this one because FFS can we have at least one thing that Oracle doesn’t ruin upon contact?

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WordPress should deprecate themes — a modest proposal by Mike Schinkel
Personally, I have never found a theme that is 100% useable without some significant HTML+CSS customization and/or PHP/MySQL/Javascript customization. And even the best themes use approaches that result in sites that require a huge amount of time to maintain the content because the themer made easy coding choices rather than build functionality to allow managing content with less effort. Examples include using categories to group content where a custom taxonomy would be better, and a custom post would be best.

WordPress themes as they currently stand should absolutely be done away with, even though the concept of separating presentation from content is an excellent foundation.

Sepearating content from presentation might have been the original purpose of themes, but that definitely hasn’t proved to be the case in practice.

Put more succinctly, the law of unintended consequences strikes again.

As a general rule, I find that themes, (and I’m not including every theme developer or designer here, just lots of them), promise way more than they can ever deliver.

I can’t count the number of sites I’ve worked on over the years in which management of expectations with regard to what a client can do with a theme and what they can’t has played a significant role.

Add to this the complexities of customizing a theme so that it becomes accessible, (something required especially when there’s a lawsuit or demand letter or even just a desire to make the site accessible involved), and you have a recipe for more headache for the developer and the client than there should be.

There’s a reason I won’t touch anything from Theme Forest, which is admittedly the most extreme case but far from the only concentration of trashfire from a code standpoint that’s out there.

And I don’t see any of this changing until one of the least-modernized parts of WordPress, (the theme infrastructure) is gone.

If Gutenberg helps us get there, I’m all for it, even though I still think Matt should spend about three days without his mouse and monitor stuck with a screen reader and Gutenberg.

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Assistive technology testing on any site is important. I know that.

But effectively being demoted from someone who contributes content to a site to someone who simply tests the final product with assistive tech because Gutenberg required when Gutenberg is part of the project I’ve invested years in and accessibility is an afterthought for the top dog of said project is a thing I am never going to get used to.

I’ll get over this particular instance and steal myself for the next one but if I ever get the opportunity it’s no-mouse plus no-monitor plus screen reader plus Gutenberg challenge for said top dog.

For the entire next possible WordCamp US.

This is crap and while yeah we should all be professional bla bla bla this is personal and I’m not apologizing for it or even here for putting a positive spin on this.