It didn’t shock me to discover this, but it was one of those things about the web that I hadn’t really played with seriously. Then I started trying to expose all of the parameters for my random web colors page, so people could tinker with the color-generation rules.
Not only did the form add 24K to the page size, it increased the rendering time by about an order of magnitude.
The syntax for is just crap:
Extend this to a dozen choices, and then replicate it a hundred times across a non-trivial form. Blech.
Admittedly, in my case I’d have preferred some kind of slider control for most of the parameters anyway, but I can’t help but think that it would end up implemented with the same sort of syntax. It’s almost enough to make Java and JavaScript look like reasonable technologies.
Instead, though, I think I’ll just write an interpreter for a simple mini-language that contains just enough operators to do the job. Restricts the audience for the web page a bit, but if I distribute the interpreter as a Perl module, other people can build on it.
After a bit of tinkering, I think this is a reasonable syntax for my current rule-set:
base: r=[0,100];g=[0,100];b=[0,100] back: base;h+[-15,15];s=[0,10];v=[90,100] side: base;h+[-90,90];v=[75,85] text: base;h+[-30,30];s=[90,100];v=[0,20] head: back,side;s=[90,100];v=[20,50] link: base,text,text;s=100;v=50 visited: link;v=30
Now to write the interpreter!