Wedge

Firstly, please read http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=427913.0

Secondly:
* proper use of headers is not that significant, especially in an environment where the bulk of the actual content is user generated and that trying to optimise it is more like picking the exact shade of a colour rather than picking the colour as a whole
* there are no alt attributes in the code for the majority of images seeing that HTML 5 does not require them (and we use an HTML 5 doctype)
* image width and height - funny how even the W3C has been pushing for years to deprecate those
* most of the input elements have labels anyway
* default privacy policy is a bit difficult seeing how while it's a legal requirement in most places, that puts the onus on us to figure out a default policy that meets the legal requirements of all the different countries - which we're not responsible for in the slightest
* Can-Spam Act... do the notifications not include a link to unsubscribe from them?
* Proper Contact-Us, we can probably do

I should note that other than the first item, none of the above are actually useful in SEO terms.

I was going to write up a rebuttal to each of the points being made here, but I'll sum it up in two sentences.

Firstly, did it occur to anyone reading this debate that the above points *hadn't* gone through either or both of our minds?

Secondly, I see a lot of talk about being the best it can be and doing it a certain way which certainly sounds grand - but wake me up when you actually have some idea of how you think it should be implemented, because I'm telling you from a practical POV, it really isn't as grand as that in reality, reality just doesn't work that way.

Ever done that? That's rather enlightening, but different languages handle switch vs if/nested if in different ways, some run to linear time with the increase of options, some to logarithmic time. PHP is basically a shell around C, so it will do virtually what C does for something like that, which means that on modern systems... if you have 4+ options, or 2+ if you have cases that fall through to each other, switch is usually faster. Depends on the circumstances.SMF, Subs.php, see call_integration_hook().SMF actions (and ours) are not controlled by a switch but a local scope hash table. (Might be global scoped in Wedge, but it's certainly a memory hash table initialised directly from PHP code)Way to go on screwing up customisation, not to mention dynamic content.Not possible with 100% static.Depends on the circumstances. Also note that not all hosts are properly configured for caching, not all hosts even provide services like memcached, and often have MySQL's query buffer set way too low to be useful to the point where you might as well explicitly push queries without going to the buffer in the first place, would actually be faster on the majority of installations.There are already hundreds of templates in SMF, and we have already added more subtemplates and will be breaking the existing ones down.No.Eh? What do you think memcached does, exactly?Step 1, don't use Apache if you're even remotely concerned about performance.Dear god no. The time taken to figure out whether a setting should be loaded invariably outweighs the actual time to load that setting.If performance is your goal, you should be using APC which makes that point redundant.So let's throw out any sense of customisation then?

I'm ... an afternoon's worth (at most) behind?

I can't remember if we did that or not, actually...

I still don't hate Apple :P

It's one of the best things I've seen in a long while, it makes creating theme variations and theme editing a ton simpler IMO. (I was able to navigate around that a whole lot faster than SMF's own CSS, certainly)

No, there isn't. Kind of hard to document something that is a moving target and being modified regularly as it evolves...

There are quite a few differences, and likely there will be more as time goes on.