Serendipity Theme Contest finished!

[vvdheuvel]

As I've said in my previous post, I've looked at different Blog systems, that said I don't dislike, hate (or whatever) the Serendipity Blog tool. It's more that systems like WordPress or Blogger fit my needs. Just like a OS, some users just use it to browse, mail or type letters. Others use it to create video, art or music. My point is your activity/needs determines the system. On other important issue for me is the very bad structure of HTML/CSS/RSS code written for serendipity. Not one of these passes the W3C validators. I like OSS very much it's a important factor in the technology drive of todays market. But very often is see porly written bloated code. A good sytem is well-thought-through, well written, well designed, well documented and easy to use. Mostly one or more of these factors are missing. I always keep trying to deliver quality software.

[carl_galloway]

I actually agree with much of what vvdheuvel has said, although I also understand that Garvin has put in a lot of volunteer hours to make serendipty as great as it is.

Our HTML output is not as good as it could be. I'll give two examples,

1. Our sidebar plugins don't seem to conform to any standardised convention. Using WP as the example, their sidebars are all written as unordered lists, which allows unified styling. Our plugins seem to use a mix of divisions and spans, or html links separated by line-breaks. Unfortunately, this means theme designers often need to hack their stylesheets to suit a particular plugin.

2. Our html output in some situations looks incomplete and not well thought out. For example our search results and no entries mesages have up until recently had no styling at all, and even now the search results and archives could still be improved. Personally I am trying to do this, but some of this output isn't determined in the theme template files so takes time to understand and then recommend changes that will also still be backwards compatible.

I doubt that we could satisfy vvdheuvel's needs before we release version 1, but perhaps this needs to be considered and this completed well before we hit version2. Garvin how would you feel about getting one of the accessibility/usability advisory groups to audit our code?

Carl

[garvinhicking]

Acutally, the default template should pass the HTML validator tests since Serendipity 0.8. As should all RSS validator tests. You need to enable the "XHTML compliance" option in serendipity configuration, though. This has been set to default and removed for Serendipity 1.1.

Carl: Our HTML output IMHO is even better than WordPress's, because with their unified output you have little possibility to independently style the specific plugins. Serendipity emits many HTML selectors so that you can touch any plugin specifically, which WP does not easily allow. But you are right that some HTML is not as clean as it could be, but this has been a lot improved in the past few weeks thanks to you. And it's actually quite easy to adjust the things; they are syntactically correct, after all.

I am very sure that we can easily adapt to change the output, if we have people that tell us what they need, just like carl. Then it's a snap to alter the required output.

Regards,
Garvin

[Xtian]

Having a class for each plugin is very useful. However we could benefit from a more standardized markup. From the categories plugin:

Code: Select all

<div style="padding-bottom: 2px;"><a href="/categories/6-Web-development" title="" style="padding-left: 0px">Web development</a></div>

From the Archives plugin:

Code: Select all

<a href="/archives/2006/01.html" title="Janvier 2006">Janvier 2006</a><br />

This is inconsistent and makes styling more difficult. Furthermore I think styling in the markup is not a good idea; if I'm not mistaken, it will override the style sheet.

Maybe we could test an "all lists" version of some plugins (categories, archives, syndicate...)

Regards,
Xtian

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Yes, the categories plugin in the current 1.0-beta2 branch has been updated a few days ago to use lists instead of the old markup. We could also change the archives plugin for that of course.

The problem of inline styling is this, that if we introduce a new CSS class, it must not necessarily be in all s9y stylesheets. All those who'd have no definition of a new class would display the items differently than meant to be. Especially lists which default to show bullets would then look ugly in every other template. So this is more of a preference - we prefer to not break existing templates, which is one of the huge benefits of Serendipity versus other applications that break your theme on each upgrade.

Regards,
Garvin

[carl_galloway]

Garvin, going to xhtml compliant by default is an excellent move. There are too few older browsers out there for us to be overly concerned about supporting them at the expense of the majority who are using modern browsers.

WP still have the advantage of many great themes, suggesting that they are doing something right with their html output. I personally believe lists are more easily cutomisable, and agree with Xtian, on the other hand we will soon have lists and classes all in the the same plugin, and this will rock my world, WP will most defintely be very inferior then.

[garvinhicking]

Carl: Exactly! We should've made that XHTML move a version earlier, but now I didn'T want to break any 1.0 stability issues. But enforcing XHTML is no problem for todays browsers, and it is just obsolete to have old fallback code for that...

I'm afraid the reason that WP has more themes is not because of their technial side, but just because of the amount of WP users. They had better PR in the past, but recent activities here show me that this advantage is going to crumble for WP in the future. *g*

Once the tough 1.0 release process is done, we will be able to adjust the HTML output of plugins to be more logical and consistent. Helping hands in this are very welcome.

Best regards,
Garvin

[davidcrickett]

I have just tried WP again, and maybe they have more themes, but they certainly aren't better in any way, Serendipity's are more diverse and exciting to look at, so here is quality vs. quantity.