I can’t wait for an opportunity to use this commercial theme from Quommunication: News. It’s probably one of the cleanest, most air-tight WordPress themes I’ve come across. True to its name, News is for magazine-style sites, so it might be a long wait.

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!)