There's a couple of problems:
- I can't modify JQuery UI's CSS file to create the mixin. Therefore it seems that SASS syntax is a no go. This is what drove me toward lesscss.
- In less, the class must exist within the same file as where the mixin is used. In other words, the only way to make this work was to @import the JQuery UI theme into the base.css file. This is not an option, as one of the objectives is to allow the user to select a theme dynamically (for example: using http://jqueryui.com/docs/Theming/ThemeSwitcher)
Sass will support cross-file selectors-as-mixins soon, as well as some sort of syntax that is as CSS-compatible as possible. For now, though, I don't see a great solution... your best bet, if you wanted to spend some effort, would probably be to hack something together with css2sass.