Jeff,
Moving to CSS for style would be a great help. I was horrified to see the 'style' approach used in the calendar package. One problem that keeps raising it's ugly head when we have these discussions is backwards compatibility. I still use Netscape as the canary to find bad HTML, but judging from the access log of a few sites I manage, I would say most have moved on to more stylish pastures. But yesterday I had an interesting idea, similar to the having and eating of cake metaphor. The idea was to move the adp templates into a separate user directory. A basic OpenACS install would use the default directory to look for templates, however style minded folk might switch to using the new css based directory. Still others would copy and edit their own version of the ui.
As you know, I am a big fan of separating the tcl/db grunt code from the presentation code. Not everyone is, and we have useful, necessary apis like ad_form. However I still feel the long range solution for OpenACS is to create data structures in one file and pretty it up based on some other file. Since it seems agreement what is pretty is hard to come by, I suggest the new file structure:
packages/package/tcl
packages/package/www
packages/package/sql
packages/package/adp
packages/package/adp/plain
packages/package/adp/css
packages/package/adp/custom
Right now we have plain. Moving to css will take effort, and in the process we will destroy the plain, but working, ui. Custom sites will always make their own adjustments. As it stands now, these adjustments make updates from bug fixes, etc. difficult to incorporate into the running website. This method would allow webmasters the ability to get the fix into the plain or css adp, test it on their site with their data, and roll it into their custom page if they like the result. Of course it also keeps those pesky designers away from the tcl files :).
