There’s a nice rant by Aaron about themes. There’s a similar rant by Morten that writing theme engines is hard and there shouldn’t be so many crappy ones. The unfortunate thing is that they both don’t offer a soluton. We all know that the current system isn’t really up to the task. Everybody is complaining about it, application writers, theme engine authors, artists creating themes. But there’s three fundamental problems about this issue: The first is that we’re bound by Gtk API standards, which makes it hard to modify the current mess, the second is that no one has come up with a good API and third I haven’t seen a lot of people spending time thinking about this problem.
But what really worries me even more is that the blog contains a comment by our graphic guru Jimmac claiming that themes suck and we should instead use style guidelines and hardcode the theme. If we had done this, wouldn’t we still use Raleigh? Wouldn’t that also imply that Firefox should get rid of CSS support and use some style guidelines? Maybe I’m in a minority, but I want to be able to make my desktop look like Toontown, heaven or the cool new thing. Unfortunately, currently it always looks like Gnome.
