More markup (classes, ID's)

This is one of those where I agree and disagree. Having an id for each forum makes sense and is already there in 1.3. However, I don't quite see the point of the class as surely javascript can locate an <tr> without it having a class. It also doesn't help from a css point of view as you can just style the <tr> via a descendant selector.

More classes and id's whilst not harmful is not as simple as it sounds for the basic reason that the placement of id's and classes will rather depend on what you want to use them for. For example, lets say you have a board dedicated to discussing football. You decide you want each forum to reflect team colour. Easy enough to style the index page via a different id on each row. But what happens when you get to viewforum. Do you want the id on the main table which makes semantic sense or do you want it on the page wrapper so the whole page can be styled in the teams colours. And what happens when you get to viewtopic, should it have the forum id, the topic id or both and where do you put them?

You are not babbling. I've been thinking about this stuff for months. The problem is its not going to be possible to cover every possible situation therefore I have to come up with something which is flexible enough to please most of the people most of the time. In the end all of this is actually an argument in favour of templates which of course can be coded for a specific purpose.

I did think about group id's on posts as well as various other things but ended up with seven classes on the same div. Thats another problem. There are tons of useful things that can be done but you have to know when to stop. Again it comes down to what is going to be most useful to most people.

I always want to hear what difficutlies people are having though because my idea of what users might want to do is purely my own opinion and it might not accurately reflect what people really want or need.

One addition that would certainly be useful is either class="external" or rel="external" on links which would allow for javascript to open a new window for external links.

Just to be clear, he said it's an argument in favor of templates, not that 1.3 will necessarily have templates (meaning "real" templates, not the tpl files we have now).

You can't use the body tag. PunBB is a site component so it might have to fit into an existing page which already has an id.

You can't use the outer wrapper because that already has an id which is the page identifier. It also has the class .pun which is used for sandboxing. That means adding extra wrapping divs.