ideas for a Wordpress theme

some ideas to start on a sort of template Wordpress theme. That incorporates the following presentation elements:

• minimum-height page/content area, which feeds into the next item:
• sticky-footer - ie. that really, properly, sticks to the bottom of the browser window
• a single depth-index for positioning elements in front/behind each other, using a common CSS position/z-index mechanism.
• completely relative or screen-scaling placement of elements (I've recently been reminded how the last-mention 'depth' aspect can interact with simple things like the scrollability of elements).
• this list should grow...

- probably based upon Thematic or something kind of rational like that. Making the relationships that allow the above kind of interactions explicit and obvious: in that case building a theme is probably the way to get the most general value out of the exercise - it's effectively a level above just doing it as an HTML/CSS/some-script combo because it has to conform to the higher-level organisation of a WP theme for a start.

Then if you begin to add some of the very bread and butter functionality that I think is missing from WP - all logic - ie. theme functions... widgets perhaps...

The last few jobs have involved some deeply defective sites that couldn't be rebuilt for various reasons. Items like the above were really just scratching the surface of nasty dependencies and instant breakages possible with fairly poor HTML/CSS when buried in a Wordpress theme. Somethimes you simply can't do the kind of refactoring or even the rebuild-from-scratch. The last item should always be the last resort but code-analysis/refactoring skills seem to be thin on the ground...