[RFC|Rejected] Removal of subsilver2

[DavidIQ]

It's a rather long topic...easy to miss the details. Hope that helps others too.

[nickvergessen]

Maybe we should add that to the first post and kind of change the title of the topic.

[hanakin]

ok coming to the game a little late I guess but here goes. I am all for dumping subsilver 2, and prosilver for that matter they are both bad themes however for different reasons.

the whole debate about weather to keep subsilver is rather moot, if prosilver was done correctly then both themes could be achieved merely by tweaking the CSS

do not get me wrong I am not saying that prosilver is awful, the aesthetics of the theme works for me(All be it the color scheme screams kill me from a design aspect but I digress) however the semantics of the HTML & CSS are all wrong. We can not really put any blame on any one for this, as this is where the web was at in when was this theme released, Yikes 2005, poor practices and asinine semantics.

what do I mean by this exactly well in tolling this topic we find several possible reasons why subsilver is still a prevalent them the two most mentioned being speed(How long it takes for each page to load while using prosilver) & complexity, which stems from not only poor HTML semantics (and I uses this term lightly as most do not really understand what it means) but excessive strain on the server to load multiple CSS files and an abundance of images.

The future is now we have the tools to fix it, and it is this solely this theme that needs to ship with future versions of this software.

I am actually quite interested in running with this idea all though I am not familiar with every aspect of the forums If I can get some assistance with prototyping, It should not be to difficult of a task to accomplish. However it also depends on what the teams guidelines are for the theme, but we can save this for another discussion I kind of got way off topic a little.

[Communities]

I do not think removing subSilver, really the worst phpBB template is prosilver it was my first template and I do not really taste it is messy when you try to design a prosilver based skin, just change some things and the main characteristics of prosilver left, making haiga not no comparison

But not the point of discussion for me is the best subsilver2 created phpBB template as it is 100% customizable and I know many forums that their forums are based on subsilver2, are too sophisticated. Actually, I think you want to eliminate subsilver2 only because it is difficult to create MODs, if this is so hard for this MOD team, which must be professional in creating MOD for phpBB3 two templates available, but I will make If many users are able to switch to software.

But I mean I had read in this thread that would be a good choice subsilver3, but I feel great but subsilver3 want to call it, call it in honor of phpBB 3.1.x nickname, I have an idea as Ascar .. Subsilver3 also want to suggest that if developed and accepted by the team of developers, is sophisticated, customizable and subsilver2 and do not miss the organization. Since subsilver2 is much better for large or important because the information is well organized, not that I personally prosilver is very messy.

Greetings!

[code reader]

above seems to be machine translation, but the challenge is to guess which language was it translated from?

[DavidIQ]

Spanish. Can tell by some of the text and the "Greetings" ending which is a translation of "Saludos".

[Arty]

I'd like to bump this old topic in order to persuade developers to reconsider removing subsilver2.

This discussion is almost 2 years old, many things have changed since then. I think keeping subsilver 2 will now only cause problems instead of helping anyone.

Reasons to remove it:

• Subsilver was great style for its time, but web moved forward since then. Tables are no longer used for layout. This style is outdated by 5-10 years.
• Only tiny minority of style authors use subsilver 2 as base style. That is counting real styles, not basic subsilver 2 clones with different header, footer, icons and colors. If someone really needs to use subsilver 2 layout as base for style, there is subsilver 3 style that looks just like subsilver 2, but is tableless.
• Mobile devices used more and more often to access internet. Subsilver 2 is everything that is wrong with web when it comes to mobile browsing. It is impossible to change subsilver to work on mobile devices.
• Since this discussion was opened, extensions were implemented. Almost all 3.0 mods already don't support subsilver2, 3.1 extensions won't support it ether. That means anyone using subsilver 2 will not be able to use most extensions. Keeping it will only cause problems.
• Imagesets. Since imagesets were removed, new function to keep fake imagesets was added to 3.1. That function isn't really needed for anything other than subsilver 2. Removing subsilver 2 will make it possible to remove that fake imagesets function, as well as many useless template variables added on many pages, such as {IMG_UNAPPROVED}.
• Ajax. Ajax was implemented only in prosilver. If subsilver 2 is kept, users will complain about lack of ajax support in it.

Reasons to keep it:

• Some users do like subsilver2 and prefer to use it instead of prosilver. I don't think its a good enough reason, there is subsilver3 style built on prosilver that looks exactly like subsilver2. They can use that style.

I don't see any good reason to keep subsilver 2, not even as separate style. It is outdated and useless.

[Pico88]

+1 for Arty

[MichaelC]

We've already made it separate for 3.1 (in an effort to lessen its use) and we'll then stop supporting it in 3.2.

After the amount of outcry after the announcement of its removal I think its best to phase it out slowly.

I also think 3.1 is too close that its pointless to remove it now, it can be removed from the develop branch shortly after ascreaus is split off from develop.

[rxu]

After the amount of outcry after the announcement of its removal I think its best to phase it out slowly.

Indeed. After some part of discussion, including the members Team opinions, deprecation way for subsilver2 was chosen rather than just removal.