Re: validation… Ohhh, I see. So much to learn. If Smugmug automatically puts those things in there, does that mean I can’t change it? I guess that’s probably something I need to take up with Smugmug, eh?
I’m going to assume that SmugSmug is a program and not a dude. This is kinda something we hand-coders are always fighting against.
You’re a photographer and you just want a site. You’re artistic enough that you know exactly how you want it to look and act. But you’re not a coder. So you go to some pre-made thing or service or template (one reason people use stuff like Drupal and Joomla too). But we call this a Lemon Market because if some cars are lemons and you’re not a mechanic, how can you choose a car to buy? They’ll charge you as much for the lemons as for the good ones because they know you don’t know the difference.
Absolutely bad code aside, there’s also the template problem. Code can be well-written, but it’s still going to be ginormously bigger than you will ever need, and as Gary says, “the more code there is, the more code there is to break”… or maybe it was deathshadow who says that, but whatever, it’s true. So even when it’s as well-written as possible, it’s still easier to add bugs as you work with the code because it’s necessarily bloated. Hm, is that an oxymoron?
I think you can go ahead and alert SmugSmug of the issues, because if he/they care then they may want to fix them. But they might not. If you choose to stay with this sort of thing, then just try not to change too much of it : ) It’s kinda delicate. Also, a lot of themes and templates are editable, but only easily by someone who’s already a decent hand-coder.
Those !importants are pretty nasty, mostly because they interfere with any particular user’s own personal stylesheet (anyone can make a stylesheet in their browser, and the rules say it’s supposed to override the styles on the page, and !important is supposed to help users override stuff… which becomes a bit of a problem when the author/site is also using it).
As far as changing stuff, while you should be able to, if you don’t know why they did it, you might possibly be breaking something somewhere else. So if you make a change to their code (after making a backup of your site!!), go check all your other pages to make sure there wasn’t breakage somewhere.
