I personally believe you're forgetting the fun ;) of reinventing the wheel: honestly I just didn't think of it and beforehand I wouldn't even have known which module to search, except that javascript may have been a good start. Since it was just a quick hack, it would have been perfectly sensible. However, reinventing the wheel (if so!) did turn out to be both fun and instructive: there have been more subtleties than I would have naively assumed!