David Scotson

The strategy for making changes to Moodle core to make it more consistent and easily themeable was apparently decided on with this policy bug:

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-40187

But I've not really seen much movement to port things to renderers and/or rewrite renderers to output clean modern HTML.

Hi Bob,

could you provide a screenshot of what it's supposed to look like, from Standard or similar? This area is a real rat's nest and the hardest part about getting it to work is understanding all the options and how they interact.

Similar things happened to our staff and students with the "show one block at a time" moodle in 1.9, I believe the confusion that resulted was part of the reason this was substantially changed in Moodle 2.

The scripts should come after the close of the footer tag so that the visual stuff gets loaded fully before the javascript holds things up.

This appears to be how Essential is set up already though:

https://github.com/moodleman/moodle-theme_essential/blob/master/layout/general.php#L145-L147

edit: Actually it's confusing but, as far as I can tell, the footer js links seem to be getting put where the end_body_html function is called. Which is good, probably just the rather liberal use of "footer" in various bits of code, with various different meanings can be confusing.

"Even our most technically competent tutors were baffled by the heady mixture of of basic usability flaws including clickable parents and semantic parents mixed together",

Relevant bug: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-34838