I was the guy who did all the new focus lines of Clearlooks :)
But I would like to have a mockup for murrine, I don't want to steal the same focus line I did for Clearlooks...

Congrats on your work, your engines are always the best when it comes to GNOME.
If you want something different than clearlooks' focus, then perhaps something similar to Nodoka's would work? That would mean a single colored line in treeviews (instead of clearlooks', which shades the whole background) and perhaps a simple glow outside of buttons would work as well. I don't think that it's necessary to come out with something completely innovative right off the bat, but at least having the basic idea and removing the dotted lines should work in the meantime. There is always time to keep improving upon it, and a lot of people are very excited about a stable release of murrine that would make everything else obsolete.

screenshot/mockup? seeing is better than a hundred words when speaking of mockups...

Ok, here's a screenshot. Both the outline and the glow are very simple, yet much more pleasant than the dotted lines. http://img501.imageshack.us/img501/4210/screenshotthewidgetfactbe5.png

the treeview won't be implemented as in your suggestion because it could be quite buggy/noisy using nautilus or gtk-file-chooser when browsing. it "flashes" the screen

IMHO, Clearlooks-cairo is way better than the dots, so why don't just start borrowing that piece of code and perhaps later on modify it somewhat?
I'm using clearlooks now just because highlight of selected button is sooooo nice.... note that tints to whole button which would be amazing in Murrine!.
I whish the text boxes glowed as OSX or even Aurora (inspired by OSX) does as well...

Notice that the code of clearlooks was mine ;)
But it doesn't work perfectly with dark themes, so before merging I prefer to find a better solution

If we're talking about those dots that appear around the scales when pushing them up / down,
they get quite visible on dark themes--
it is very easy actually to remove them:
on my theme i set them equal to background-color and voila, they disappear!
fg[NORMAL] = @bg_color it took a while to learn this.
but i did not want to give up murrine.
great engine!
thx

but it is really a pity, that i cannot do the same with all other buttons and widgets..
would it be a possibility to add a function that allows to set transparency? that way one could switch it off...????

I have found the following lines to help alleviate the dotted lines issues:
GtkWidget::focus-line-width = 0 #Removes the dotted lines, but you won't know what item is focused.
GtkWidget::focus-line-pattern = "\0" # Makes it a solid line. Other values do different things. But really, every other engine out there already got rid of the ugly dotted lines and added their own focus highlights. This is the only aspect where murrine is lagging behind, it would be great to at the very least use clearlooks' focus until a better alternative comes up (I mean, even if it doesn't look that great on dark themes - at least it looks better than the dotted lines do on either.)

I want a better solution before starting implementing things.
It's not fun write and rewrite things (now write code as clearlooks, in the future rewrite it all...)... also it is a wasting of time.
No, I want something functional, and then I will implement it.

@Cimi
You're right, I'm sorry. I didn't take the developer's burden into consideration. Then, would something like this be alright?
http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/9535/focuscd7.png I think it looks beautiful light AND dark themes. I took the screenshots from the latest Aurora engine (1.5.1).
Is it possible to implement this look or something similar to it?

@perfectska04
thanks for this tip!!
GtkWidget::focus-line-width = 0
GtkWidget::focus-line-pattern = "0"
the dots are gone and this is the most important!