Movable Type, tonight at midnight Pacific time, plans to release a Sandbox development plugin which separates markup from presentation and style in theme development. The concept is a utopian Mecca for many standard-coherent designers who attempt to structure webpages in a standard structural way and then apply styling to adjust and modify the way the look and feel is conveyed.

It is a valuable Mecca, so don’t let my words be a denigration of the concept.

Movable Type’s Sandbox plugin comes bundled with a handful of themes to get developers and users started. Notably, most of the themes come from the WordPress Sandbox theme competition.

I certainly applaud MTs desire to innovate and push the platform forward, it seems like they are playing catch up. Regardless, playing catch up is better than not doing anything at all.

Good luck to the Movable Type team!