Have been playing around with WordPress.com – very nice.
For years now people have obsessed with separating style from content and have thought that ‘style’ is the same as ‘layout’. CSS has been used for layout, which it is a very bad language for (unlike many templating languages glancing at a CSS file does not tell you what a page design will look like which ruins the whole ‘view source’ model that made html so successful).
XML is a much better language for layout, but we are stuck with CSS, and so will have to split CSS into separate layout and style documents.
Andy Skelton & Scott Allan Wallick’s Sandbox theme is the first time I’ve seen something that moves towards separation of style from layout, not just style + layout from content. There is a lot that could be done with that – particularly if the semantic placeholders that have no real ‘layout’ component are separated out.
If that were done, and there was a convention for class names for specific types of element (e.g. a class for text can have font, size, color properties etc.) a generic css styling wizard could be built against it.