Good cause I need a shower.

The issue that I have with the direction that the XOOPS theme engine is heading is that all of the simplicity has been abandoned.

As a theme designer, I am expected to follow suit and build my work on top of the new XOOPS default.

In all honesty at this point in its evolutionary process I am saying "F*** that!"

Its nothing personal against the people working hard to refine it.

Its just that its too raw, too chaotic.

css driven is a nice thought, but until its really a standard for XOOPS and not just a good idea, I will continue to ignore it.

All in all this has been a fantastic thread.

As someone who's been fiddling reguarly with html pages for many years now, I can see and agree with all of you here...

Yes - I can see the merits of variable sites, although the pages I work on reguarly are fixed width... mainly to fit within the site, and to fit the browsers of 100% of our customers screens (even though perhaps 25% upwards use much wider screens, that would benefit from extra screen real-estate...)

Yes, I can see the benfit from CSS - and table-less sites... I normally have to edit around 40-60 tables per day... at something in the region of 200-500k of html at a time... But the usage of table-structure makes this quick to work with and to make changes....

But I've not played with CSS in all it's good and bad points as much as I have table-based sites... I really need to get to grips with this.

Quote:

Biteronboard,

I totally understand your statement. In fact, I almost wish I could take back my commitment to building the 30 themes project on a simplified version of the new default theme. However, that is where my laziness comes in.

I don't want to hijack this thread, so I will make this very brief. The new default theme is meant to show what "can be done". The Generic theme that I'll be producing will be much more simplified and will focus on only the major layout elements. This is taking more time than I expected to produce. (Mainly because I'm feeling burnt out this week.)

I agree this thread is good. If nothing else, it's good to get a feel for where the most active theme designers are in our community.

Just to clarify a bit...

I'm not a standards Nazi. In the real world, compromises must always be struck. For me, I've found it best to just approach each situation without any pre-defined notions and base the code around the overall objective of the design. Sometimes this leads to table-based layouts. Other times this leads to table-less designs.

Another option for fixed-width: I did a theme once that loaded a specific style-sheet based on screen resolution. One for 800px, 1 for over. I guess it could be adapted to more resolutions. That way it always suits whatever resolution your user has - downside is extra style sheets, I suppose ;)

When you get around people that have good eyesite and that is a lot of people. You'd be surprised how many can see well enough to read fine print. I was watching some guys play World of Warcraft the other night. The screen was out of site for me, but those guys had the 22" screen dialed into max resolution. They could see everything that was going on.

One fix for the text size, is providing a text resizer script in the theme. I've got these now on almost all sites.

Variable themes will require text resizing, and graphic resizing, etc. The graphic tools ImageMagik, GD can probably be used. THe tools will have to be called from within the theme code according to the enabled screen size.

Building competent variable themes, is going to make theme building a much more difficult process. I mentioned I only use variable width themes now, and I think that is the future for themes.

To my simple mind, Fixed size is confining and restrictive. Not everyone has the same size screen, same ability to see, etc.

It's much better to establish a min-width for a screen allowing design controls while at the same time allowing infinite max-width... I think you should use liquid or wireframe css with resizable fonts. Oh and DO NOT use tables.

So far as I can tell anything else is old school. If you want to read more you can go to: http://www.w3.org/

btw. Will I agree all this has to be simple. Like James, I'm trying to make that work. Easy Liquid/Wireframe CSS... what a concept!