On the podcast today we have Mark Root-Wiley.

Mark builds WordPress websites for nonprofits in Seattle, Washington, USA with a focus on accessibility and usability. He's a long-time WordPress community member in Seattle and has previously helped organise WordPress Seattle meetups and WordCamp Seattle speakers.

He maintains Nonprofit WP, a free guide for people building WordPress websites for their nonprofits, and has a few free plugins available on WordPress.org.

He’s on the podcast today to talk about why he thinks that it would be useful for WordPress to adopt some CSS standards.

Over the years, as WordPress has evolved, the way that you implemented CSS was very much left to the individual user, themer or developer. You could do what you like, and that worked very well, after all, we all have preferred ways of doing things.

Now however, the reach of WordPress has outgrown those early roots and some 40+ percent of websites are using it. Projects that were built by one agency are often taken over by another. Users are often swapping themes to reflect their brand. Extra work is created for those inheriting sites as they try to unpick the way that the CSS is built and implemented.

Mark thinks that it’s time for WordPress to lay out some simple standards which are easy to understand, and if they became universal, would save us a lot of time and head scratching.

He’s not proposing anything radical, just some basic advice for the most commonly used CSS, and it’s quite a compelling idea which would need a lot of community buy-in, and possibly some top-down approval if it were to move forwards.

It’s very much the kernel of an idea at present, but thought provoking nonetheless.

Useful links.

Standardized Design Tokens and CSS for a consistent, customizable, and interoperable WordPress future

Standardized block markup, theme.json design tokens, and CSS classes to improve interoperability

Variable Design Token Scales with Static CSS Classes (Proof of Concept)

Core Styles and Theme Customization: the next steps

Explore options to add back semantic classnames to block wrappers

Add a Style Engine to manage rendering block styles