style resistance

Ye gods, Movable Type’s 3.2 style sheets are complicated. I’ve spent the last couple of days restyling my blog as part of a giant combo workover of everything that may eventually see the light of day — yes, I do have a development machine now, so I am not continually messing up the live blog. I have a design that I like now but its still built around the existing MT CSS and there’s like 800 lines of extraneous complex stuff in here that I don’t need. Plus: hardcoded widths and font sizes. ew.

I’m torn. On the one hand I could strip down the style sheets to about a quarter of what’s there and have much cleaner and simpler code that was easier to change and maintain, but then I’d end up forked from MT and I’d probably eventually have to come back and restart from the defaults again some time in the future (which is what I’m doing now after taking that step with my initial MT 2.x install).

On the other hand, the CSS people at MT actually know what they are doing. I know CSS reasonably well at this point, but I am not up on the multitude of cross-browser hacks and workarounds so I’m opening myself up to lots of bugs and issues and worry down the line. If I stuck with the existing style sheets I could have some confidence of not having to deal with that and, more importantly, I could just go on with my life.

I think I’ll have a couple cups of coffee and think about it. (it’ll take less time if I’m caffeinated).

Update: I know you’ve been anxiously awaiting my decision. I merged and cut everything down. Yes, its true: I am forked.