Skinning GMail

I was just reading about a neat utility someone developed to "re-skin" the GMail interface. More than that, I was especially fascinated/impressed with how he went about figuring out the needed styles by obtaining the source files of the iframes.

I think Google could really benefit by providing an easy way for users to re-skin their various products. Why not let people go wild with themes?

"First, I wanted to get a dump of the HTML that Gmail generates, so that I could get a feel for its structure (remember, Gmail generates nearly all its HTML through Javascript, thus a "View Source" command will not reveal much). The DOM Inspector showed that Gmail relies on a few IFRAMES for its different views. Once I had figured out which IFRAME contained the mailbox view, I exported its generated source to the clipboard using a JavaScript one-liner invoked from the location bar: javascript:window.clipboardData.setData('Text', window.frames[0].frames[3].document.body.innerHTML). This step had to be done in IE; while Mozilla also supports copying to the clipboard, the code to do so is much longer. The extracted source could then be pasted into a file, run through HTML Tidy (for easier reading) and examined."