I wonder if it isn't a good time in the webs evolution to come up with or popularize a theme standard, and if bootstrap isn't a good step in that direction. This might help accelerate adoption and popularity of themes, especially open sourced themes, saving everyone a lot of time. This is the kind of thing I don't feel proprietary about at all, and would rather share my designs with others to improve and extend than re-create the wheel.

I'm working on a web application platform (coffeescript running concurrently across a cluster of nodes, basically). I'm still working on the backend, but once it is released publicly, I want to start building out a built-in frontend. To that goal, I'm planning to ship a web framework built in, and Bootstrap is the leading candidate right now.

I know popularly you buy themes which are collections of HTML and CSS and that they make it easy to have a nice layout without having to swipe a 37signals page-- you just change the content to suit what you want.

I see bootstrap coming from one end- a cohesive framework to make developing pages easier-- and themes being going a step further-- specific designs for everything but the content.

And I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to have a sort of theme architecture for bootstrap.

What I'm imagining is that themes could be specified, and developed in such a way that they could be traded as tar balls and quickly and easily used by projects. Much the way wordpress themes are standardized and plug into wordpress, these themes could be standardized and plug into bootstrap. Hell, the bootstrap page has an almost theme creator that lets you customize bootstrap. (http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/download.html)

I'd love to have the ability to point my web platform at a github page, and have it suck in the latest version of an open source theme for people.

I'd love it if themes became a popular open source item. You may think this is a bad idea, but I see it as taking the framework idea and building another level on top of it. Sure, some people will just use stock themes, others will make custom themes.

... and a lot of people will learn web design by taking apart themes and understanding them.

Does a standard format for bootstrap themes make sense?

(Please don't flame me if I've missed something here- this is an idea, and I admit to not being a bootstrap expert.)