Color independent themes

["Jason J. Herne" <hernejj clarkson edu>]

Hi,

I'm not a developer, just thought I would bounce this idea of off people
on the list.  If this type of posting is frowned upon please let me know
and I'll avoid it in the future.

I am very much an eye candy person and as a long time Gnome user, I've
always been very pleased with the amount of freedom available to
customize my user interface.  However, one thing I've never understood
was why every single theme that is provided is only available in a
single color.  If the author of a theme wants to provide a second color
scheme he/she needs to create a whole new theme package.

Now, I may not understand everything to due with themes, but wouldn't
it be relatively easy to create themes that allow the user to change the
color scheme?  The theme author would simply define a set number of
"colors" (with default RGB values) and name them something like
"WINDOW_BORDER_GRADIENT_A" and "WINDOW_BORDER_GRADIENT_B" and then if
you want your window border to fade from blue to blank instead of red to
black, you would simply edit the RGB values of the colors on a nice GUI
form, part of the Gnome theme manager.  A side effect of this may be
that graphics created for themes should be grayscale?  Just some
thoughts... let me know what you think.  

Thanks for all the great work you guys do on Gnome!!

- Jason Herne (hernejj clarkson edu)