Hi Vanessa,
You’ll need to ask the theme creator but my guess is yes, it is needed. It probably refers to a “reset” stylesheet. The purpose of this stylesheet is to remove any inconsistencies between browsers so theme authors can write their stylesheets in peace.
Your website won’t stop working if you remove it but you may notice visual changes across different browsers.
That being said, this should not be visible in your website’s HTML. Styles like this should be pulled in from external stylesheets. You should definitely mention this to the theme author.
Daniel
The code you’ve posted is just a comment. You can tell because it’s surrounded by /* */. A CSS reset simply removes all browser-specific styling to help ensure that your site looks the same in all browsers.
You can probably safely remove it, but be aware that if you edit the theme files directly, you’ll lose those changes if the theme is ever updated to fix security issues or bugs or to add new features. May I ask why you would like to remove it, though?
Thanks for your explanation stephencottontail,
The only reason I wanted to remove it is I thought it may have been some sort of unwanted script which may prevent me from customising the theme.
This is a similar concern that I had with this other code I came across in the header section:
<link rel=”profile” href=”http://gmpg.org/xfn/11″ />
I made a post about this 3 hours ago but have not had a reply yet.
I am a little puzzled why theme contains links to other website blogs. I also am wanting to know if this code can be removed?
Thanks for any advice on this one,
Vanessa
Hi Vanessa,
That is completely sage to leave in there it just points to a meta data profile. It has to do with how your website is parsed by search engines and how it is viewed by browsers. There’s absolutely no reason to be concerned about these things 🙂
If you want to modify your theme definitely do use a child theme, it’s the only way to do it safely. You can find info on this here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes
http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/how-to-create-wordpress-child-theme/
Daniel
Ok thanks for links Daniel,
But wont the bloggers from the http://gmpg.org/xfn/11 webpage gain a huge SEO and hits benefit from this link being in all the WP themes?
I am still not clear why this link needs to be in the code if it is not of any benefit for my website.
Thanks for any clarification.
Vanessa
Hi VanessaLove,
There are no bloggers there, it’s simply a link to a specification. The Gooogle home page itsef does the same thing, it has this in the HTML:
<html itemscope=”” itemtype=”http://schema.org/WebPage” lang=”en”>
My suggestion is to not worry about these things. Judging by your questions you are a newcomer to development. You will benefit your website a lot more by supplying good content. Once you become more comfortable with the code end of things you can start worrying about things like this.
You can find more information about that specific but of code here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16636870/what-rel-profile-is-for
Daniel
You are right Daniel, I am new to development.
Thanks for links and info.
Vanessa
No worries 🙂
It’s great that you’re showing an interest in the code as well, I think you’ll learn in no-time. I would recommend not getting lost in the details though, you probably have to tend to tons of things aside from this anyway 🙂
Daniel
