Ustjae Iddingkay.

“A growing trend lately is to place what would normally be “sidebar” content under the main content. In light of this, perhaps “sidebar” isn’t the best choice. How about calling the old sidebar <div> #supporting, #subContent, or #misc?” Beast-Blog

If “center” is too presentational, should we move away from “header” and “footer”? Or is that moving too far from WordPress convention? Or is the convention corrupt in this case? Suprameta and Inframeta are probably too silly.

I think it’s mixing languages too. I may have to live with main.

… any other suggestions for “widgetarea” and “center/main”?

I can’t be the only one liking center, can I?

Maybe “central” ???

Why “access”?

Darn, you caught me proposing code, CircleReader! Yeah, sidebar is kinda annoying. I was talking more about the template tag though. Now that’s presentational. With 2.5 you can do stuff like <?php get_sidebar('primary'); ?>, and include a file called sidebar-primary.php. Very cool. But weird if you’re not making a sidebar, like say something in the footer. What’s that, a footer bar? What if the main bulk of your content is going to be held in a widgetized area? Totally possible. Anyway, the tag calls it a sidebar, the admin area calls it a sidebar but I don’t like that it’s a sidebar.

Which brings me back to my classes, you’re right, maybe I shouldn’t call it a sidebar. Widgetarea, widgetregion, widgetzone, widgetthorax… it’s tough.

… any other suggestions for “widgetarea” and “center/main”?

I can’t be the only one liking center, can I?

And if you are really going to push for structural naming, why not avoid “sidebars” entirely? I hear the term “widgetarea” is hip with the cool kids…

I like the ordinal ID’s, though. They’re, um…classy. ;-)

Center could imply formatting. But then so does header and footer. Body is confusing and I like content where it is, wrapping content. It just seemed logical to me, extending the metaphor of the physical body to the divisions of the markup (Head, feet, center of gravity). In my mind it describes the code: it’s between the head and the foot, it’s the center.

Thorax briefly flashed through my mind and was quickly dismissed. Thankfully.

Microformats: I’m expecting Sandbox (and Sandbox-based themes) to become a lot more popular very soon. I think this might be the year of microformats. What with Firefox 3 apparently making it easier to do “stuff” with them and Yahoo apparently incorporating them into searches.

Apparently, I say, because I haven’t really seen any of this yet.

One of the things that I didn’t realize Sandbox did for the longest time was support the hAtom microformat. http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom