Following the first part of the post, here is the second post for me to share more stuff regarding my upcoming theme for flisterz:blog.

Comment section

Besides the frontpage, the second most important part of a Wordpress theme, in my personal opinion, is the comment section. How the comment is arranged, where to put the Gravatar, how to align the forms and so on. I dont have any sketch or draft for this section; so everything is done while coding. If i like the look; then I proceed; else I’ll just re-code the whole thing.

My first idea was to put the comment form on one side, and the list of comments on the other side. I used to do this in my third version. I still remember ikram-zidane said that the comment list and comment form should be on the same side. The final idea for the form is to mix both idea; and it turn out pretty good so far.

Another idea is to get rid of the form labels; those with ‘name’, ‘email’, ‘website’ and so on ; and put some nice little icon to act as the label.

This is nothing new; I’ve seen this in some other websites before. However the concern is; what happen if my blog is viewed with a non standard compliant browsers or mobile devices that doesn’t support CSS very well. The icon will not appear and theres no labels on the forms. Visitors will get confused; what should be filled inside this form and that form and so on.

I believe this is called user accessibility usability. Correct me if I’m wrong.

The solution I’m using is simple. Instead of directly remove the labels from the code, I’ll just apply a simple CSS to hide it from normal view.

#commentform label{
display:none;
}

So when viewed from a mobile devices or any old browsers; the label will appear to guide the visitorsl.

I am trying to give a very huge attention about user accessibility/usability especially in this upcoming theme. When to use image replacement technique and when not to use it; the importance of <ul> tag around the template; the loading order of page elements and so forth. I’ll talk more about this later; maybe