Why does twentysixteen take a free hand in dealing with longstanding usability principles?

In postings from 1996, Jakob Nielsen said that the research suggested that presenting visited and unvisited links in two separate colors is profoundly better than going with one-color-fits-all. He give sundry guidlines including having unvisited links look vibrant and alive and visited links look dull and washed out. Krug's Don't make me think! is inconsistent but in the last recent edition, he says to pick two colors and stick with them.

Twentysixteen allows you complete freedom in choosing one color for all of your links: kind of like Boss Tweed's saying, "I don't care who does the electing, as long as I get to do the nominating."

I've been developing a child theme for twentysixteen, and there are some things that were not strictly usability concerns, but the goal was simply to get Wordpress working with its flagship thing without repeating problems the ?yearly? "Top 10 mistakes of web design" list.

One UX person gave comment that with blue unvisited, purple visited links, underlined everywhere (though the menu might not need them), all cater to a needlessly low user proficiency level. The point he seemed to be making, which leaves me mystified, was that my site was simply much too usable.

I don't think I understand Wordpress if its flagship theme does not AFAICT respect the annual "Top 10 mistakes of web design." That article is not a textbook; it'd a cheat sheet, and basic usability could go further.

What is going on in the development process if twentysixteen's pretty usable but I have to create a manual stylesheet if I want differentiated link colors and links usually underlined.

Why did twentysixteen not opt in to some basic usability guideline observance? There's part of the picture that I don't have: for on

Topic theme-twenty-sixteen child-theme themes Wordpress

Category Web

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answered at

Your question is totally misdirected and should be directed at core developers on wordpress.org.

You are also totally missing the whole point of the core bundled themes. The main purpose of bundled themes are to showcase new developments in core and what the core developers find interesting. They are not there to please the masses with pedantic link colours or outrageous graphics and backgrounds.

Furthermore, the bundled themes are like any base themes available, they give developers a very basic platform/starting point to work from. It is your responsibility as developer to modify these base themes as needed to suite your particular needs.

Just stop and think for one moment, take the popular Underscores base theme (to which I have no affiliation to BTW). Just like the bundled themes, it is meant to be used as a skeleton framework onto which you can build a theme on. Just think now, if the developers of Underscores go and suddenly incorporate colorful links and some other elaborate crap into the base, it would drive theme developers up the wall as they would now first need to take care of removing all these useless extras before they can start development on something that makes sense to them.

TO CONCLUDE

The bundled themes, like the new twentysixteen theme, are not meant to aesthetically please the masses and to conform to someone else guidelines of what they think a theme should be or not be. The bundled themes are purely there to showcase core developments and improvements, and also serves as a base theme (like any other base theme available) which developers can use as a starting base on which they can create their own awesome theme on

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Hmmm, your rant is 99% off-topic, but to give some context, the default themes are meant to be technological show case, and not "the best" (for any definition of "best") for any specific use case.

There are actually very few* people involved with wordpress development so it is very understandable if no aspect of wordpress out of the box will get a 5 stars. Most people here can rant for days non stop about the quality of the core code.

But wordpress is open source developed by volunteers which as most OS projects has too many coders and not enough UX people. The best way to make a change is open a ticket and submit a patch.

*There are many contributors but most are involved in very small and specific aspect, only few define what is good enough to be released.

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