Templates, and support of driver linked files etc - revisit the old ST idea

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Recent work from a community person puts forth a really great idea that could be valuable as an overall foundational improvement to the HE..

His idea was (paraphrasing) to use a template file to integrate to his app which allows control over the html tile layout.

Past dev work I've done forced me to stumble over the learning curve of the roots of HE as they grew from the weaknesses of the Smartthings world. But reviewing ancient drivers did make it apparent that some good things (IMO) have actually been discarded for simplicity. Considering that HE is calming down, it might be a good time to revisit what was lost.

Specifically, in old ST drivers there was reference to Tiles and images that could be loaded as reference directly from the driver.
I'm not a ST fan, and not much of a programmer for this stuff - but, there seem to be some clear benefits to allowing / supporting functional features like this. By using a templated file, users could store their copy in the HE file area and instead of loosing layouts each time an app or driver got modded or upgraded - it would be nice to not break or need to visit 'custom' versions of apps.
Also a benefit, many drivers bang into 1024 limitations - this would give a safe and secure way to validate large code chunks whether for Images or html since it could be 'filtered' at the Hub level.
Numerous apps currently have to point externally to cloud for icons and such - moon phase for example. All of these reasons, to me, indicate a potential for this idea to improve the future of the He Hub.

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Moon phase actually let’s you put the icons in the file system

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Just need to use http://yourHubIP/local as the alternate path…

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You make my point for me... the user has to load them - they can't be written from the driver! Managing stacks of icons really is passe - but not to be overly flippant, it is useful that his driver has the ability to allow localized icons and I do use it (his? yours? I forgot who wrote it!).

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I wrote it, but don't have a way to read/write anything other than text files to the File Manager

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thats exactly what I'm hinting at! there has been a community head knocker - trying to write an image (without using base64) ... also ST drivers used to have a tile = and icon = (off the top of my head so that could be not exactly correct) that don't port from ST to HE. maybe HE would put that function back in, and let a driver push a tile, a template, an icon. etc... I think it'd be really useful!