I've gone down that road many times-- both Wordpress and Tumblr have terribly difficult to work with theming CSS for what are ultimately often fairly simple looking websites.

@manton So maybe this is a job for machines too? If so: slippery slope, eh?

yeah — of course it’s still possible to create a theme from a few php files and a single style.css but hard to find a ‘simple’ theme that does that anymore

that’s how I taught myself to hold websites, now half the time I inspect a site, even someone’s personal site to see how they did something it’s really hard to decipher.

Yeah, WordPress has really been stretched well beyond its origin as a blogging platform and it shows in what gets delivered to the browser. I’m still using it because that infrastructure and flexibility is valuable for some projects.

You might be shocked by some of the HTML I see for Unread’s webpage text service. Megabytes of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (not counting media like images or video) to display a few paragraphs of text with some navigation.

don't get me started about those machine-generated slugs

Yeah, agreed. A huge mess. I'm glad to have my two WP sites moved over to micro.blog. I still love coding my own html and css but I'm done working with WP.

Preach.

Yeah, I’ve just now finished two block themes and … nearly all [markup and CSS] is basically taken care of by core, and then you use JSON to filter that CSS, override only the bits you want to change. Bit of a learning curve, but it works rather well. Except for porting to other platforms, I can image.