I thought it would be a fun weekend project to port a simple WordPress.com theme to Micro.blog. What a mess! Lots of different CSS files that look like they were generated by machines, not humans. It’s drifted too far from the “view source” web.

@manton I've gone down that road many times-- both Wordpress and Tumblr have terribly difficult to work with theming CSS for what are ultimately often fairly simple looking websites.

@manton So maybe this is a job for machines too? If so: slippery slope, eh?

@manton yeah — of course it’s still possible to create a theme from a few php files and a single style.css but hard to find a ‘simple’ theme that does that anymore

@manton that’s how I taught myself to hold websites, now half the time I inspect a site, even someone’s personal site to see how they did something it’s really hard to decipher.

@manton Yeah, WordPress has really been stretched well beyond its origin as a blogging platform and it shows in what gets delivered to the browser. I’m still using it because that infrastructure and flexibility is valuable for some projects.

@manton You might be shocked by some of the HTML I see for Unread’s webpage text service. Megabytes of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (not counting media like images or video) to display a few paragraphs of text with some navigation.

@manton don't get me started about those machine-generated slugs

@manton Preach.

@manton

Yeah, I’ve just now finished two block themes and … nearly all [markup and CSS] is basically taken care of by core, and then you use JSON to filter that CSS, override only the bits you want to change. Bit of a learning curve, but it works rather well. Except for porting to other platforms, I can image.