Shameless plug to my favorite toolkit: Qt has had this for ages now: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.6/stylesheet.html

The Qt guys also have been trying to take this a step further with the declarative UI / QML (basically a tiny DSL for UIs) project:

http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/05/13/qt-declarative-ui...

I love Qt. My current project at work is all Qt, and it is so, so easy. After Gtk (no offense to those guys), Qt is fun.

by 'ages' you mean 1 year?

Try Qt 4.2 which was released October 4, 2006 and thats not even to mention the fact that you could use it for months before that. http://doc.trolltech.com/4.2/qt4-2-intro.html#widget-style-s...

@krainboltgreene

I don't know, I think that's a reasonably long period of time in graphics framework development.

When did 4 years become "ages"?

Great in concept, but copying from CSS itself seems like a bad idea. The lack of abstraction can lead to some really inelegant stylesheets or necessitate writing the stylesheet in another language and generating CSS with a compiler. The lack of conditionals and variables is, to my way of thinking the most significant limitation.

I can understand adding stylesheets to GUI. That makes sense, perfect sense even.

But to copy all the flaws of CSS as well?

This change seems very much in line with the GNOME philosophy. It would _greatly_ simplify theme creation.

. . . and still look horrible.

You can't say that here! But the screenshot makes it pretty clear.

Edit: that's the default engine, as it says in the blog post. I still think GTK looks awful, but this is not really good evidence.

GTK+ doesn't "look" like anything. Themes and engines do though. Is that your complaint?

Technicalities and semantics. The only thing that matters is what I'm presented with as a user, and what I get when I use it does not look good.

Yeah the default look is crap. We don't have a lot of options on Linux, though. Qt doesn't have many good themes either and it doesn't feel as nice as GTK. Enlightenment feels really quirky and unpolished.