So I've been looking at accessibility issues lately and wanted to get a sense of how Drupal 6 themes stack up against the xHTML STRICT standard and also CSS 2.1. I reviewed over 30 Drupal 6 themes in comprising this list. I did the validation via W3C's Jigsaw & HTML Validator. I expect many of these will change in the coming days, and there may be more I need to review, but this list is as of March 9, 2009. I have added notes on accessibility & validation on all of the themes tested. At this point there were only 13 themes I tested which validated for both CSS & XHTML STRICT validation through W3C.
I've written a follow-up article testing the most valid themes with other accessibility tools.
XHTML 1.0 STRICT & CSS 2.1
- Ability Theme
- Agregado Theme
- Artists C01 Theme (Doctype is Transitional but validates Strict)
- Andreas02 Theme
- Box_grey Theme (Doctype is Transitional but validates Strict)
- Blue Bars Theme
- Blue Lake Theme
- Blueprint Theme
- Celju Theme
- Chanel Nine Theme
- Clean Theme
- CWS Theme
- Flexible 2 Theme (annoyingly conflicts with switch theme)
- Four Seasons Theme
- Framework Theme
- Genesis Theme (and subtheme)
- Light Theme
- Pluralism Theme
- Sky Theme
- Slash Theme
- Sharepoint-like Theme
- Tendu Theme
XHTML 1.0 STRICT & CSS 3.0
- Barron Theme (and subtheme)
- Pixture Reloaded Theme
- Simplex2 Theme
- Zen Theme
Just XHTML 1.0 STRICT
- Acquia Marina Theme
- bluebreeze Theme
- The Dark Theme
- Deco Theme
- Foundation Theme
- Green 'n' Black Theme
- Newswire Theme
- NoProb Theme
- Scruffy Theme
Skyliner Theme - SpreadFirefox Theme
Just XHTML 1.0 TRANSITIONAL
Just CSS Validates
- Blix Theme
- Burnt Theme
- Dreamy Theme
- Foliage Theme
- Hiroshige Theme (previous version validated)
- Leaf Theme
- Nitobe Theme
- Pushbutton
Does Not Validate
Nickbits posted two interesting survey questions Do you think it is important for (X)HTML & CSS code to validate? and How important do you think it is that (X)HTML & CSS validate?
The Drupal Markup Style Guide is a good starting point for theme Development.
If there are themes that should be added to the list, or themes that now validate (or don't), please add a comment to this post.
Comments
Couple of themes to add
http://drupal.org/project/genesis - XHTML 1.0 strict, CSS2
http://drupal.org/project/pixture_reloaded - XHTML 1.0 strict, CSS3, will probably remove the one CSS3 property use in the next version.
http://drupal.org/project/newswire - XHTML 1.0 strict, CSS uses a workaround for Opera which will probably be removed in next version
Thanks! I've updated the list
Must say you've added nice documentation for your themes. Thanks for outlining the flexibility you've added.
I like what you did here
I like what you did here, I for one don't really mind themes that are don't validate as sometimes the extra effort to get everything working isn't worth it.
as long as the theme works under all major browsers then I'm happy.
What about the Garland theme?
What about the Garland theme?
I can't remember....
I did this last year and not sure if I reviewed the core themes in this or not. However, I'll be looking at Garland & D7 more before the launch so will look back at D6 shortly.
Add new comment