I have spent about three days with Dolphin now and am starting to learn its funny little ways. There are many small problems with my installation that I'm sure I'll sort out sooner or later, I am a bit surprised at the degree of 'hack' that seems to be required for a script that sells itself on being modular and managable through an API.
The more i delve into the mechanics of the site, the more it seems to be composed of tweaks around a fairly coherent core. One worrying result of this, is that Dolphin doesn't verify as the xhtml transitional that its header proclaims it to be - even the homepage for unity, which contains nothing tricksy or special has 300 errors for validation at the w3c website.
See what I mean and try your dolphin pages here: http://validator.w3.org/
Most of these errors are due to really simple omissions in the php files that generate the pages - such as end tags ommited and unencoded ampersands - Call me old fashioned, but I do like to write clean code, so the prospect of going through the hundreds of php files to correct these is making me wonder wether dolphin is viable for me.
Why should I care? Why not just leave it?
Quirksmode is the answer, It is really hard to make predictable cross-browser design when every browser that is pointed at your site has to decide for itself how it wants to treat the file - there is absolutely no point in giving a file a xhtml header only to negate that instruction and invoking quirksmode by not using valid markup.
True it isn't the end of the world, but it really does make dolphin look like amateur script - and perhaps something that isn't solid enough to survive the competition.
