It’s perfectly ok saying “Valid XHTML and CSS” but it may be nice to say that it is pretty stuffed in all older browsers. An example is IE6 and some of the old Mac browser versions. I am in no way dissing these themes though. What I have been looking for are specifically REALLY nice WordPress themes…. Here is one of them.

Catastrophe.

Absolutely lovely in the fact it is very well designed and will suit a LOT of uses. But it is certainly ‘Catastrophic’ if you view it in IE6.

Let me show you the screenshots of what I am talking about:

'Catastrophe' Theme in older Browsers eg IE6

As you can see on this website, I am using the sociable plugin.

There are NUMEROUS fixes that need to be made to make it validate W3C XHTML.

Heres ONE:
When you are wanting to display the sociable items on the index page where it will be repeated on every post for the same page. Validation result returns that it already has the ID’s specified.

CSS Basics dictate that you only use ‘ID’ ONCE on a page
‘CLASS’ is the re-usable css.

Go to the plugin sociable directory and find “sociable.php”

Edit the PHP file:
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You will notice that this site utilises category icons.

Dodecahedrons for ‘Branding and ID’, a coffee cup for ‘Random’, a lightbulb for the ‘coding Bits’ category and so on.

This IS possible to do by using a WordPress plugin but like all plugins, they are made for general purpose and include features that you do not necessarily need. All plugins are usually quite extensive and harder to modify. Why use 1000 lines of code in various php files when a ridiculously small and simple bit of code will suffice.

Example: The plugin ‘category-icons’ is 724KB with 60 files in 13 folders

My method is 2 very simple files and 8KB using ‘incat’ and ‘iscat’ and does precisely what I need, and no more

MIND BOGGLINGLY SIMPLE!

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