Methinks you are either sitting upon a high speed connection most of us can only dream of, or you have a different definition of "fast" than I do... since just trying to get into gmail takes around 20 to 30 seconds for me when it decides to work. Mix in the "dive for the zoom" because the accessibility is nonexistant and that it blocks around a third my legitimate traffic... Yeah, like most Google crApps I don't use it and with good reason. Which is sad as eight or nine years ago I thought webmail was going to kill off mail clients and self-hosting. Now with the scripttardery, ajax-tardery and general developer ineptitude it's sent me running and screaming back to mail clients like M2 or Thunderbird. Simple fact is that from where I sit, webmail is less useful now than it was a decade and a half ago, and MOST of the bs discussed in this thread is WHY! This here's a story 'bout Billy Joe and Bobbie Sue... Kidding actually as: IS a valid point -- a lot of people have unrealistic expectations and sometimes you have to know when to walk away; but that's why quite often you either need to sit them down and explain things ahead of time, or walk before money even changes hands. This whole "now now now", "pretty who cares if it's useful to visitors" and "credit mentality" that's taken over the industry disgusts me to the point of nausea. Shame 99%+ of wordpress themes and the core code you can't change from the theming system REEKS of "caching what's that?" Look at the ALLEGED premium theme half the halfwits out there will point to as the best starting point that I already mentioned -- "uDesign"... static CSS in the markup in a STYLE tag, static scripting in the markup, endless pointless use of those stupid malfing "data" attributes for information that isn't content and as such has no business in the markup, bloated "semantics, what's that?" markup... So much for caching a blasted thing; combine that with 13 separate JS files, 13 separate CSS files (with incomplete media stacks) Joe help you on first-load... which is why the DEMO here takes around 31 seconds on a 45mbps connection first-load and 12 seconds cached. Handshaking ALONE kills it. So why have I NEVER seen one apart from something a now deceased friend had deployed six or seven years ago that ALMOST pulled it off but still fell way short? Some of you can probably guess who I mean... The utter and complete lack of security, efficiency, and the absolute rubbish that are off the shelf themes just ****'s anyone who uses it out of expediency or ignorance. If you can't put the effort in why the **** are you making a website? You couldn't pay me to use that crap. I can't even fathom how people can defend it. But to be fair, I say the same thing about Religion so YMMV.
I was actually gonna say that I have a working XHTML strict theme running on my own WP-install, but I realised I haven't checked it for ages, and when I did right now, I realised that there is a few bugs after updates I've never bothered fixing - hence there are error-messages (strict warnings) threwn through the code. The site itself isn't too bad, though, although it's now... hm. At least 6 or 7 years old, and isn't really up-to-date on media-use and responsive design. Shouldn't take more than a couple hours to rectify, though. However - I still see quite a few lines of code in there that bloats the page - when using plugins (and not modifying them yourself), that tends to happen, unfortunately - if you're able to avoid using plugins (more or less possible if you're making your own theme), you could avoid that.
Well, uDesign was described as the only theme you'll ever need. Of course, any theme that tries to be everything to everyone will inherently have a lot of bloat - I was never a fan of uDesign at all, so agree with you there. The reason you never seen a theme that doesn't contain bloated CSS/markup is because it takes effort to trim it. End users simply don't care, so why waste the time - generally, developers try to stick to a somewhat semantic markup structure - but at the end of the day, it's the design/layout/visual that sells, not the code. Perhaps there is a market for clean, semantic, accessible premium themes? I don't know. In my full-time job, I work on a site/app created from scratch. We use third-party libraries such as jQuery for the cross-browser JS support (though these days that's becoming less of an issue), but the majority of the site is hand-coded. In my after-hours job, I work on custom Wordpress coding for clients. Perhaps this means I am biased a little - but I settled on Wordpress after evaluating many other platforms/frameworks for the following reasons: 1 - The CRUD/dashboard work is already done. I spent close to $10,000 + 4 months hiring developers to achieve a similar thing for a product I was creating from scratch for the exact reasons you describe - I didn't want to use a bloated framework as the base of my app.. The end result was nowhere near as customisable or user-friendly. I have since ported this work to Wordpress. 2 - Wordpress is popular. It is reliable and has a huge marketplace of existing extensions and themes. Of course, the quality of these vary but you can find well written plugins and themes if you look hard enough. 3 - Managed hosting - A lot of hosts specialize in Wordpress hosting. This is another pain point that can be alleviated simply by using a well-known framework (admittedly, hosting isn't that painful but it IS easier to have someone else manage it). 4 - You have huge developer support. Hiring someone to work on a Wordpress app/site is a LOT easier than hiring someone to work on a custom site. 5 - It's successfully used by many large corporations without issues - CDN caching etc (can be achieved with plugins) pretty much eliminate any issues with load/stress/speed, so that's no longer an issue. At the end of the day, developers are well known for having strong conflicting opinions so I think we'll just have to agree to disagree. I do respect your opinion though, and you make a lot of valid points - and I'm not trying to prove anyone wrong, just trying to explain my reasoning for using it. It's all about the trade-off for me. After all, hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive. Don't reinvent the wheel. etc etc