I noticed recently that the comments section of my journal had a very tiny font. I quickly hacked up the stylesheet to increase the font size, but was dissatisfied in general with the look and decided to do something about it this weekend. If you’re reading this, you’ve already seen the result. I used the Titan theme from the Theme Foundry as the base for my theme code. I wrote the stylesheet completely from scratch. Here are a few things I did that were new to me.
border-radius - Rounded corners everywhere!
The curved underline in the top navigation menu, on the sidebar and the blockquotes (one of my old posts has this) are not images. They’re the result of a new css property I found out about called border-radius. I liked it and I have hence used it all over the place! The interesting thing about this property is what happens when you use percentages to denote the radius instead of the usual px. The curves at the end take a slightly different shape, which I liked. However I didn’t keep it because I didn’t know if they were standard or unintended side-effects.
Spam-free Wordpress
I realized that the plugin didn’t really work or worked badly since I was still getting spam comments to moderate. So I replaced it with a text based captcha. I hate the image captchas since I cannot decipher most of them most of the times.
ARIA and the Wordpress doctype
Wordpress uses the aria accessibility attributes for input tags (specifically, aria-required) and sets the doctype as XHTML 1.1. The result of this is that W3.org validator complains of aria-required being an invalid attribute. I looked around online and saw suggestions to either ignore the error or remove the attribute. Both are wrong. The correct resolution is to set your doctype to this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+ARIA 1.0//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/schemata/xhtml-aria-1.dtd">
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