FriendsElectric has quite a few bugs, true - but IMO, none of them are so critical that they make it an unusable theme. Even with its table rendering problems and its sometimes-weird sidebars, it's still one of the nicest Drupal themes, as well as the only theme with a tableless layout that is a candidate for inclusion in core. And it's native to PHPTemplate. Someone pointed out that tableless layouts do actually validate as XHTML. This is true, but is no excuse for using such layouts when you don't have to. We all know that they're bad for accessibility (screen readers), portability (browsers in phones), etc. There are a lot of sites out there that are using Drupal in its simplest form: as a pure blogging tool. FriendsElectric might not be the best theme for sites that are 'pushing the limits' of Drupal (e.g. E-Commerce platform, media hub), but I think that Drupal bloggers would benefit greatly from having it as a theme in core. As for maintenance... well, I can see how that alone would stop FriendsElectric from going into core. Jaza. On 5/3/05, Steven Wittens <steven@acko.net> wrote:
The only big issue with this is that FriendsElectric does not render pages with wide tables correctly. This is because of the tableless layout. There is also a problem when the left sidebar is longer than the rest. I've been unable to come up with a good solution for this, as something in the theme triggers a weird Mozilla fieldset stretching bug when I try the conventional way to fix it.
Typically, overflow: auto; is used to make scrollbars appear on wide content, but this doesn't really work for big tables like we have in Drupal.
Really, tableless CSS simply does not mesh with a complicated system like Drupal. Sure, it's doable for a limited site with a limited amount of options. But as a generic theme for a CMS? I have my doubts. It is trendy, and a very viable option for blogs and other simple sites, but the fact that 99% of all tableless designs can't even handle clears inside them says enough about the robustness of the whole thing.
The world would be a much better place without IE: then you could actually use the table-layout model through CSS. Every other browser that matters supports it as far as I know.
Finally: if FriendsElectric goes into core, who will maintain it? Putting the theme into core gives it a much higher exposure, but are any of you willing to handle the CSS that tableless layout requires? Or will it just mean more support requests to handle?
Steven Wittens