HAGO

HAGO 0.1 is a Holy Grail version of the Basic theme. It uses the borders of a container division to provide the backgrounds of the sidebars, per http://www.alistapart.com/articles/multicolumnlayouts/ . This uses cleaner markup than providing a separate background division for each column per http://matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/equal-height-columns-cross-browser-cs... , and is a more lightweight solution than grid-based themes.
HAGO can be installed as a subtheme of basic, a standalone theme, or a hybrid of the two techniques.

Drawbacks

As the sidebar backgrounds are supplied by a border and not a division, it is difficult to provide background images and borders that completely fill these columns. In three-column use, the border of one sidebar will not extend fully down unless the content column is shortest.
Also, (surprise, surprise) IE6 compatibility is imperfect if you use borders.

Roadmap:

• 0.4: current three column layout, IE6 compatible w/ minor issues.
• 0.5: Automatic column detection.
• 0.6: Add distinctive appearance features.
• 0.7: Add SASS.
• 0.8: Cross-browser testing.
• 0.9: StarterKit
• 1.0: Stable release.
• Possible future additions or future projects:
  • Dropping footer per http://matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/keeping-footers-at-the-bottom-of-the-... , or a fixed-position variant.
  • Strip out features such as breadcrumb and menus, in favor of including them as blocks.
  • Five column, nested holy grail theme.
  • HTML 5.
  • Future Project: duplicate the above using CSS3, at first using http://code.google.com/p/css-template-layout/ , then adapting to whatever specification is adopted.