Theme "Love" for cpg1.4.x

[Starlight]

Ooookay, after a very long time of hesitating I decided to contribute a new theme...
But I already expect you to tell me how messed up it is... 

I tried so hard and hope I didn't leave any mistakes.

P.S. Yeah, another cheesy theme.

[phill104]

Thank you for your contribution.

To you and other potential contributors, please do not hesitate to give it a go. While you may make mistakes we are all here to learn, you should take any criticism as a positive thing.

The best kind of user is one that gives something back to the community so keep those themes coming.

I will install this one now and see what it comes up with. Have you tried validating your code?

[Starlight]

Have you tried validating your code?

No... I have no idea where to do that. *blushes*

[phill104]

Go to the following 2 pages and put a link to your live gallery in the box and see how many errors your page comes up with.

First the css.

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Then the HTML

http://validator.w3.org/

Almost all sites will come up with one or 2 errors but if you have loads you will need to work through them one by one to get your code up to scratch.

[Starlight]

Ah thanks. The css seems to be fine. (yay!)

I had 51 errors in the html. Fixed some of them but didn't really know, what the others meant...

[Gene-2008]

I would be best if you give a pointer to your site...

Some could help with HTML errors if we could see them..

Gene

[Starlight]

  Hehe, okay...

http://starlights-graphics.de/gallery/index.php?theme=love

[Gene-2008]

Most of your errors are in the template.html where you are not closing your column i.e. <td> with a </td>
You are also not ending <img ...... > with a /> for example:
<img src="images/header.jpg" width="800" height="230" alt="">
Should be like this:
<img src="images/header.jpg" width="800" height="230" alt=""/>

On the admin menu you have a class of nav and it is not defined.

In you theme.php you need to end
$template_sys_menu  with a </div>

And you need to start $template_sub_menu with a <div>

I cleaned up your errors...check the zip below.

Gene

[phill104]

Well done. I was going to tackle this later but you seem to have got there first. I have not looked yet but from the validation page I hope you have put a description in the alt tags as I hate to see them empty.

[Starlight]

Oh... Thank you so much. I will compare our versions of the template and theme. Cause I'm not sure if I really understand all the errors.

i.e. I closed all my <td> tags with </td>
The image thing is new to me. I dind't know I had to close them as well. Thank you.

Phill: I really need to put a description in the alt tags..? Ugh!  But why?

[Joachim Müller]

I really need to put a description in the alt tags..? Ugh!  But why?

Hm, not really imo - you just need an alt tag, but that can be empty. There's no need to add a description to every single graphical element imo.

There are now 46 errors left when validating your new theme. As suggested, you mustn't use <img src="themes/love/images/heart2.jpg"> but <img src="themes/love/images/heart2.jpg" border="0" alt="" width="30" height="30" / >
The border attribute is needed because some browsers will display a border around the image if the tag is ommitted. The width and height attributes are needed for faster processing: while the image are being loaded, the browser already "knows" how much space the images will need without the need for re-rendering of the screen once the image finished loading. The alt attribute is needed for standards compliance mainly. It can be empty for images that are purely decorational. It is meant to provide information for non-graphical browsers, during the loading stage of the image, for visitors with limited eyesight (screenreaders) and in case the image is broken. It's beyond the scope of this forum though to teach you HTML basics (like why the attributes of particular HTML tags are needed), but there are many great resources to learn from - just google for them. As you're German I can only recommend http://de.selfhtml.org/, which is simply the best resource on this planet for HTML and CSS. 90% of what I know about HTML and CSS come from Stefan Münz' great and profound documentation.

I'm not sure if I really understand all the errors.

Most of them should be pretty self-explanatory, however if you're looking for a kind of automatism, "Tidy" can fix many of your mistakes automatically - just enabling the checkbox "Clean up Markup with HTML Tidy" on the W3C validator page and try validating your actual theme's template file (http://starlights-graphics.de/gallery/themes/love/template.html), i.e. go to http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fstarlights-graphics.de%2Fgallery%2Fthemes%2Flove%2Ftemplate.html&charset=utf-8&doctype=XHTML+1.0+Transitional&group=0&verbose=1&st=1&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.654 (ignoring the complaints about the missing header information and the curly braces). Don't use the Tidy output literally, but use it in comparison to your markup.

[Starlight]

Joachim, thank you for all the useful information...
No, no, you don't need to teach me html basics. I'll look up the things I don't know at selfhtml.