[wp-hackers] WP 2.5 gallery breaking xhtml 1.0

[Otto]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 9:02 AM, Alex Hempton-Smith
<hempsworth at googlemail.com> wrote:
> The problem comes with themes which aren't updated regularly; users will
> implement the gallery feature and won't have the necessary skills to fix the
> stylesheet, and they'll think WP is broken or something. I completely agree
> that the core shouldn't be adding any styles, but I think we do need a
> fall-back for older themes.

I disagree. Users are generally smarter than you are giving them
credit for. Any person capable of running WordPress on their own site
*will* customize their theme somewhat. Nobody really runs stock
themes.

And if they don't know how to customize their theme to fix the gallery
in particular, then they go searching online, find some forum posts
(the WordPress support forums are extremely well indexed by Google),
and finds somebody saying "insert this chunk of code into your theme's
style.css file" and voila.

This is less of a problem than you're making it out to be. We don't
need full and total backwards compatibility here. We don't have that
for the alignleft/right/center classes, it's not been a big issue. We
never had that for the new tag stuffs either, it's also not been a big
problem. New classes have been added to WordPress in almost every
release, we never had to deal with this before, we don't have to deal
with it now.

Make the default and classic themes work properly, and be done with it.


> This fall-back should be in the form of a default plugin which adds the
> styles for older themes.

No. Just put the code into the theme stylesheet. When forum users ask,
we tell them "put this code into the stylesheet". It's a problem we
know how to cope with. Don't make it excessively complicated.
Installing a plugin is harder than copypasting into a theme file.

-Otto