@define {
    $bordthickness: "1px";
    $bordstyle: "solid";
    $bordcol: "#fc0";
    $lightcol: "#fffffe";
}

.box {
    border: $bordthickness $bordstyle $bordcol;
    background-color: $lightcol;
}

Come to think of it, I suppose if we’re going to go that direction, we might as well just use php to generate our CSS files. I suppose this way would make it server-independent though.

I’ve read John Allsop’s post about web patterns, and it also interests me a little (along with microformats). This would be quite useful when creating your own style frameworks and starting points, but I’m not too sure about creating some kind of universal rule-set for everyone to follow. However, it would definitely be useful to have a global vocabulary to define the elements of a web design. I remember back in the day, when flash intros were all the go *shudder* we had a demo movie that showed all the animation techniques we used (eg. wavy text, splashing text, typewriter, tile-fade, etc.) so we had a way to discuss with clients what they were actually after, and also with other members of the team on the project.

As for Blueprint being applied commercially, I agree. I’ve already used it on a project, but by the time I was finished with it, I’d customised the number of columns and their widths, the container width, as well as some of the typography. (This tool made it a bit easier at first…). I didn’t practically use much of what it offered. Because it was just a small site, it didn’t really save me much time, although I guess the real test will come soon enough.

On a slightly related note, I would love to see a way in CSS to define your own color names as well. So I could do something like:

@color: borderColor=#ccc;

and then constantly use “borderColor” in my CSS rules:

.panel
{
border: 1px solid “borderColor”;
}

(with quote delimiters, since I imagine parsing arbritrarily defined color names like that could be perplexing)

However I can point to lots of in the wild cases daily in which we need to separate the id style rules and apply a layers class cascade of rules for a comment design element over multiple pages etc. Its a nice idea however. A simple starting point would be to get all the headers, footers, columns and content on the grid named the same from a universal context.

Blueprint has lots of good points as it brings together a lot of good ideas and techniques into one framework. Still I can’t see it being applied commerically with out some degree of personalisation.