Clean Theme

Clean is a minimal 980px theme for bloggers, small businesses and portfolios: twelve block regions, a one- or two-column layout, a sidebar that can sit on either side, and a Nivo Slider front page with captions.

The line on its project page I still care about is the one about markup: content source ordered, tableless design, and heading optimisation. In 2012 that combination was not universal. Plenty of contributed themes still used tables for layout, or emitted a sidebar before the main content in the HTML and pushed it back visually with CSS — which meant a screen reader, and a crawler, met the navigation and the block soup before they met the article. Clean puts the content first in the source and lets CSS place it, and its headings descend in order rather than being picked for their font size.

That is the same argument I make now about semantic markup and rendering strategy, with better tooling behind it. Search engines and assistive technology both read the document, not the design, and a theme that gets the document right does something for every site that installs it which no amount of styling can substitute for.

Five releases over fourteen months, and around 160 sites still reporting. Nivo Slider is the part that has aged worst — an abandoned jQuery plugin is a liability rather than a feature — and it is the piece I would strip if this were still an active project.