incompl

ThemeRoller is starting to take on some of the features of a framework, as hinted at during the jQuery Conference at MIT.  You may know it as a handy tool for creating skins for jQuery UI widgets.  What makes it more is the idea of being “ThemeRoller compatible”: designing your own widgets, or perhaps own sites, using the predefined CSS classes used by ThemeRoller.  ThemeRoller takes care of some of the CSS problems you might have solved on your own: stretchy background images, relative sizing of elements, and browser compatibility.

It seems awfully simplistic for a framework, but it is serving the same purpose. How far can we go, using a predefined set of CSS classes instead of picking our own when we design?  I’m not sure yet if a whole site could be reasonably made this way, and I’m not sure anyone has tried.  But it is an interesting question: stylesheets are already reusable on a small scale (element selectors rather than class and id selectors) and it is fun to wonder if we can make them even more generally useful.