This theme is an implementation of the "Holy Grail" layout, as presented by Matthew Levine's 2006 article in A List Apart: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/holygrail
Levine wrote that he wanted a system which:
- Had a fluid center with fixed width sidebars,
- Allowed the center column to appear first in the source,
- Allowed any column to be the tallest,
- Required only a single extra div of markup, and
- Required very simple CSS, with minimal fussing.
This is indeed an incredibly flexible theme and uses a little CSS to do a lot of the heavy lifting. Your 'main content' will appears first in the source code before the 'secondary content', regardless of how it appears on the page. "Sidebar-Content-Sidebar" layouts, "Content-Sidebar-Sidebar", "Sidebar-Sidebar_Content", are all super-easy to create and edit, using only CSS. You can also create fixed width themes adding a single line of CSS.
This theme is meant to target developers who have a decent grasp of CSS. My goal is to develop this theme as a lightweight base theme and allow fast and agile development of 'semantically nice' sub-themes.
This theme is used as the base theme of the OpenScholar project.
This theme was first developed by Crell, then by NancyDru and now by Shaun Wolf Wortis.
