theming

Although I am an expert in executing HTML and CSS, I am not an expert in the details of the HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0/1.1 standards. As such, I have had some strange misunderstandings of how it all works. When compared, XHTML strict is an elegant thing of beauty and order, while HTML transitional is an unholy land of disorder and corruption.

And why not think this way? Whenever I have taken a peak under the hood of a poor looking site, it was in HTML 4 with disordered markup. Whenever I look at a good looking site, it is in XHTML with orderly markup.

I was tasked with maintaining a Drupal website that had 44 views. The template.php file for the theme was unwieldy. I spun off all the views template code into another file for ease of maintenance, but it was still 1333 lines¹ weighing in at 36.5kb! ^{[1] Just four more lines and it could have been elite!}

The quantity of views certainly wasn't pretty, and when I had to add in another view, I decided that enough was enough. It was time to clean it up and develop a system to help keep the views under control.