I’m not deep-enough into the playlist fu to have a strong opinion on the smart playlist implementation, but what you’re suggesting sounds reasonable. My interest in playlists is mostly of the static variety — for example, a music professor can create a playlist of required listening for a class. The web interface should be simple.
I’m familiar with cross-browser issues when coding up dynamic html. My motto is to keep it simple. I’ve got a working mock-up of a three list library browser much like iTunes (artist, album, tracks). The lists update dynamically as artists and albums are selected. I say mock-up because I’m populating it with faked library data for now. But I understand the @blah@ hooks and it’s close to working with real data.
Something I’ve been puzzling over is whether to use http xml requests to update the page, once editing is in place. This is all the rage, but I haven’t much experience with it. And heck, when I think about it, it sounds like it overlaps the daapd protocol. A lot.
1. User browses library.
2. User changes the name of a track. Implemented as client-side javascript doing a POST.
3. Page picks up changes. Implemented as client-side javascript making an xml request to mt-daapd for updated artist / album info.
Would it be possible to use the javascript xml requests to hook into daapd? I don’t know enough yet to say. But hey, it would be killing several birds with one stone, and making possible a whole range of client-side browser functionality.