I'm not aware of any specific links that discuss this topic, but it is something that has been bugging me for a while as well. While there are over 50 style templates that come delivered with SAS, they are getting a bit dated. The good news is that in SAS 9.2, ODS can read CSS files directly so that no Proc Template knowledge is needed to write your own styles. You can even use the Enterprise Guide Style Editor to create your styles graphically. We are going to be working on some new updated styles in the next year or so to deliver with the next version of SAS, but I'm hoping that we can make them as downloads as well.
Until the above mentioned things happen, there are some things you can do now. Since you say that you are really only interested in HTML, you can use the stylesheet= option with the (url="...") subption (e.g,., ods html file="..." stylesheet='filename.css'(url='mystyle.css');). This will put a link to your own style sheet (i.e. mystyle.css) that you can customize as much as you want. Since you are doing everything directly in CSS, you can use the full power of CSS context selectors to do some fancy things. This does, of course, require knowledge of CSS and some design sense.
The next thing to do would be to use a Javascript toolkit such as, my favorite, MooTools
http://mootools.net/ to create some nice effects. These effects are really specific to what you want to portray in your report so you'll have to play around with them a bit.
While it is really difficult to come up with something that ships with SAS that would be general enough for anyone to use, I think that you make a good point in that it would be nice to see some state-of-the-art examples on just what is possible.