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Comment by zelphirkalt | Hacker News Reader

They encourage lots and lots of bad practices. I mean, just look at themes and how they are built by default. Comments in a CSS file describe the theme metadata. Using concattenation instead of composition everywhere, so that parts of HTML are not reusable. CSS, inside JS inside HTML inside PHP ...

Part of it is this implicit structure it defines, which file it loads adter ehich other file to make a whole page. It seems convenient at first, if only you know it, but it encourages people to not properly finish all their HTML elements on the same file, but split them up stupidly and end them in other files, never to be reused.

It all seems very beginner-mistake like. But I guess they are stuck with this now, because thousands of themes rely on this, instead of having a structure based on composition. Contrast this for example with how one uses Jinja2 templates rendering blocks and macros.

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Their mantra of ‘never break backwards compatibility’ is a double-edged sword.

It makes them extremely friendly to non-technical users, which I think is the majority of their userbase.

However, it makes it impossible for them to change technical decisions made in the past.

That would be fine, imo. But seeing as their new development efforts (Block/Gutenberg themes) are also making horrible decisions when they no longer have to (such as putting templating markup inside of HTML comments as JSON)[1]

E.g:

    <!-- wp:latest-posts {"postsToShow":4,"displayPostDate":true} /-->
    <div class="posts"></div>

I've lost any faith I had in their core development teams competence. I would understand if development choices made 20 years ago weren't all that great by todays standards, and never breaking backwards compatibility would be the reason it still is bad today, but their new themes can be used independently from their old themes as an entirely different implementation, so they had a chance to finally do what is industry standard, and they chose to again make it horrible to write theme markup code that is prone to errors, has no editor support (what editor supports JSON in HTML comments?) and enforces more spaghetti to be made.

[1]: https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/getting-started...

You've got some pretty compelling arguments for why WordPress shouldn't work, it's I think even more interesting to figure out why it has. Especially on a site like HN, which has "terrible" UI and code, it even still uses single-pixel spacers! :)

I have not looked at the code of HN. Is it public? And what parts of it are terrible?

I think single pixel spacers and such things are of a different quality than the design (code) flaws brought up about WP though. Their impact is different. One merely influnces the layout of things while the other for example influence how whole themes are structured and how many pitfalls WP developers set up for themselves by writing unmaintainable code.

I think there's some confusion in your comments. The HTML comments aren't a templating language, there's no (or little) post processing when displaying this content.

They're annotations that indicate where a 'block' of content starts and ends.

The JSON data stores some values set by users for a block that can't easily be parsed from the HTML content.

The content is stored as HTML as most content a user creates is static HTML, so when displaying content much of the HTML is displayed verbatim (but without the HTML comments), and then there's only a little bit of progressive enhancement for dynamic content.

I think you're also conflating some terms, like 'themes' and 'blocks', these are two different things and launched years apart.

Not the GP, but I still remember, when I was looking for where one could set an abbreviated version of a text (I don't remember, if it was a whole post's text or some description or what.). I must have searched for 30 minutes or so, until I gave up and searched in a search engine. Imagine my disbelieve, when I saw, that they use friggin HTML comments, to indicate where to make the text cutoff. In terms of storing data cleanly in the database, this is a bad design. Also sooo unintuitive. There is a field or button for everything, but suddenly I need to put HTML comments into text. What.

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