Dear iGoogle,

I’ve been building Google gadgets for a while now, and there is one thing I’ve struggled with: getting a gadget’s colors to match the colors of its container’s theme. That seemed like a mouthful, so let me break it down.

Suppose my iGoogle theme has lots of natural colors: green and brown. A gadget on that page would look better if it contained green and brown elements. But if my iGoogle theme had pink and purple colors, a gadget with green and brown elements might not look the best. A gadget’s color scheme should match the color scheme of the iGoogle container theme.

Already the iGoogle provides a few substitution variables like the __BIDI_* variables. The gadget container should pass color substitution variables along to the gadget as well. For example, __COLOR_LINK__ could be the substitution variable for link colors, allowing the iGoogle theme to set a common link color to all of the gadgets on the page. There could be a handful of different __COLOR_* variables that would be passed along for button colors, highlight colors, text colors, etc.