HUROX frames: the window-chrome toolchain

Dec 2006 – Jun 2007 · age 24–25

What it was

The pipeline that drew hurox.com's window frames. A border was painted once in pure red, green and blue, each channel standing for a colour the viewer would choose: title bar, background, frame. A slicer cut it into nine tiles, and a small compiler turned each tile PNG into a PHP program that GD ran on every request, redrawing the pixels in that viewer's three colours. One picture, any colour scheme, nothing pre-rendered. Generation one used batch files and two slicer tools and was the version wired into the deployed site. Generation two described every frame style in a short s-expression file, generated the templates and the JavaScript that consumed them, then ran the template compiler itself. It died on June 6, 2007 mid-step, with four new styles declared and no pictures drawn for them.

Wins, for the age

At twenty-four, turned bitmaps into programs: run-length line detection, cheaper allocators for pure channels, and a load-test page of 811 uniquely coloured requests to see if the server could take it.
Found channel-as-palette tinting on its own, the trick Warcraft III's team-colour masks (2002) had already used, and applied it per web request.
Nine-sliced the centre of a nine-slice to get an interior bevel: two layers of chrome from one PNG.
Replaced four workbenches of batch files with seventeen lines of s-expressions. A mammal who needed sleep had already learned to hand the repetition to a generator.

What it taught

Encode the variable in the asset. One artefact, parameterised at the edge, became a lasting habit.
The second tool should be data-driven.
Regenerate only what changed, but say so. Skipping existing outputs silently kept stale tiles.
A generator should refuse to emit entries for inputs that failed validation. This one printed an error and dispatched to functions that never existed.

Genealogy

Ancestors: none on record. The chrome was invented for this site. Descendants: none on record. Colours in the URL later became an ordinary CDN feature. Part of: HUROX.

Epitaph

Here lies a toolchain that painted window frames in red, green and blue and taught PHP to redraw them in your colours every time you looked. Its second life ended one June night with four styles named and no pictures for them.