Under the hood, minimalist WordPress themes are anything but

I had never been completely comfortable with the previous theme I set up for abbett.org, even though I had modified it extensively, so upon discovering a list of “minimalist” WordPress themes last week, I started trying new looks. I’m still not settled on a new theme, and I’m discovering that many of the simple-looking themes out there are just disasters of code: capellini nests of PHP and CSS, hidden by delicate facades of sans-serif typography. Used out of the box, they look pretty good, but a lesser man could easily be broken by even basic attempts at customization.

I don’t doubt that there are a few standards-compliant, easy-to-modify themes somewhere that match careful visual design with elegant code, but I haven’t stumbled across them yet. (I also haven’t done a scientifically exhaustive search.)

But I’m really trying to get at a larger point: RSS represents the failure of HTML. HTML should be more than sufficient to convey the written word, but it has become loaded with cross-browser hacks, meaningless DIVs, navigational elements built of lists and headers with no semantic value, etc. One can rarely view the source of a web page and get an understanding of how the page’s content is organized. Skinnable blogs, while a boon to the Internet at large, are a major contributor to this problem.

Meanwhile, RSS succeeds, proliferates even, because it is simple, it is structured, and it is consistent; it is the essence of content, perfect for man or machine. Forget the blogs themselves; just take the content and run… to Google Reader, to Live Bookmarks, to Thunderbird.

But I have one lingering problem– I hate using RSS readers. They take the life out of syndicated content. Just as there’s something special about the tactile experience of reading a newspaper, about the smell of newsprint, about relaxing on the couch with that week’s New Yorker — a well-designed blog offers more than just text. Logging on to ruhlman.com and stevesilver.net everyday (rather than seeing a list of headlines on Facebook) has a similar distinction to picking up that fresh magazine.

What’s needed, in my mind, is a return to the web’s roots: strict separation of content from presentation — along with excellent content (spell-check, proofread) and excellent presentation (typography, typography, typography). RSS won’t be as necessary once the source data itself is interpretable, and simpler HTML, I presume, will make for simpler WordPress themes, and simpler customization.

(But don’t look at my source code just yet!)

This entry was posted on May 19th, 2008 and is filed under HTML, Typography, WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.