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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.

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These days I don’t usually drink coffee past noon, but I’m going to make an exception for today because it’s cold outside.

Plus, the embargo has finally been lifted on my favorite peppermint mocha creamer and I haven’t had any of that today.

Right now I’m incredibly thankful for the radiator heat, and at the same time I think I totally get why people up here will open all the windows once it reaches 50. Compared to today, 50/55 was absolutely balmy yesterday.

We got our first flurries last Thursday and we’re supposed to get more today. That counts as the first technical snow if not the first impactful one.

And yeah, I can’t wait for the first one that sticks because there will be pictures of snowmen this year. I haven’t made a snowman since I was a kid and I’m really looking forward to it.

162 McCormick Ave, State College, PA 16801

Cloudy

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Current status: Hangry.

Really, really hangry.

We are having tacos, and they will be in my belly, but I’m thinking I might end up literally inhaling them because I am that hangry.

We started a new book, and this is book 149 of 150 in my challenge. After this one I’m not going to up the challenge any more this year so we can read slower or read less, mostly so we can read slower though.

I’ll talk more about books when I’m no longer hangry.

921 S Pugh St, State College, PA 16801

46 °F Clear

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I agree with a lot of the posts I’m seeing from the Unfiltered Blind Tweets twitter account.

That said, I can’t get behind a single individual claiming to represent the views of every blind person.

It’s no different than the NFB claiming to be the voice of the nations blind, or anti-NFB people claiming to represent the views of blind people in opposition to the NFB.

And you’d never see this on Jewish Twitter, for example.

Any single individual claiming to post unfiltered Jewish tweets would be ratioed with a quickness because we’re all comfortable with the fact that there are a range of opinions and views on just about every issue, and we have a serious problem when someone else, (especially someone outside the community), attempts to speak for us or divide the community into good and bad Jews based on expressed opinions or actions of particular Jews.

See, for example, the frequent “What about Israel!” replies from the left any time a high-profile Jew expresses an opinion about any political subject, or Donald Trump’s label of “very disloyal” for Jews who don’t vote for him, which happens to be most of us.

We should be careful about who we allow to represent us, and the best representative we can have is ourselves, not someone whose primary goal is to acquire clicks, whether that’s the NFB, anti-NFB, or someone who’s using their voice to talk about what may be controversial topics they view as important.

117 McCormick Ave, State College, PA 16801

32 °F Mostly Cloudy