JBossDeveloper

I agree with seammm. Adding actual skinning to RichFaces is very important. In my opinion this should be seen as a means of quality assurance:
- the core developers at jboss need to get feedback from the folks trying to customize the look in order to be able to assert that their approach to component skinning is sound and actually works in practice.

The theoretical possibility of skinning doesn't entail that skin customization is actually doable in a real life scenario. If a development team gets the impression that RichFaces is too plastic and cannot be adapted to their corporate layout easily, their natural desision can only be to keep looking for a different JSF component lib.

I find the current approach to RichFaces skinning to be theoretically sound but quite unmanageable in practice.

For example: try to create tabs, panels etc. with rounded corners. This is quite impossible with css changes alone, because tabs are rendered as a single div. One would have to add custom renderers and custom skin classes etc.

The statement that the creation of a different skin for the 60+ components only underpins the fact that skin customization is currently too difficult.

I believe that this is due to a lack of modularity when it comes to skinning.
In the mere context of visual representation, complex components should be nothing else but an assembly of simpler components. Thus, a skin might be fully defined by providing style classes for visual atoms, i.e. atomar visual building blocks, like a panel, button, tab etc.
Customizing these visual atoms on a per-component basis should be possible but should not be the default showcase for skinning. This way, the creation of a new skin would merely entail the definition of styles for those visual atoms.

Please vote for it in http://labs.jboss.com/wiki/RichFacesFuture.