This is an attempt to help with #61 by storing the creature state in the querystring.
However, a crucial issue with this implementation as it stands is that it stores the random number seed used to generate the creature. This is great for representing the state in a compact form, but it's also likely to break easily as the vocabulary and randomization algorithm changes.
So, in the future, we might want to represent the creature state by enumerating the actual structure of the creature, which is likely to be a bit more future-proof. (It also makes it possible for us to add features in the future that allow users to tweak the randomly-generated creature.)
But for now at least, this will allow users to use the back and forward buttons in their browser to navigate between creatures, so that if they click randomize and skip past something that looked cool, it's easy to go back and visit it.
This addresses #61 by making mandalas permalinked.
The URL to a mandala will change whenever the user stops fiddling with it for 250 ms. This means that the user can always reload the page to get a reasonably recent version of what they were creating, and they can use the browser's "back" and "next" buttons to effectively undo/redo recent changes. They can also copy the URL to share it with others.
## About the serialization format
Originally, I stored the state of the user's mandala in the URL using JSON. This had a number of drawbacks, though:
* **It was really long.** A mandala serialization was almost 1k characters, which was a very big URL, and one that some sharing platforms might even reject.
* **It wasn't type-checked in any way.** Unless I added some kind of JSON schema validation (which I didn't), the serialization was simply deserialized and assumed to be in the proper format. This could result in confusing exceptions during render time, rather than decisively exploding at deserialization time.
To resolve these limitations, and because I thought it would be fun, I decided to store the mandala state using a serialization format called [Apache Avro][]. I first read about this in Kleppmann's [Designing Data-Intensive Applications][kleppmann] and was intrigued by both its compactness (a serialized mandala is around 80-120 characters) and schema evolution properties.
It might be going a bit overboard, but again, I thought it would be fun and I wanted to play around with Avro. Also, I tried architecting things in such a way that all the Avro code is in its own file, and can easily be removed (or swapped out for another serialization format) if we decide it's dumb.
[Apache Avro]: http://avro.apache.org/
[kleppmann]: https://dataintensive.net/
## Other changes
This PR also makes a few other changes:
* Tests can now import files with JSX in them (I don't think this was required for the final state of this PR, but I figured I'd leave it in there for its almost inevitable use in the future).
* The value labels for number sliders now have a fixed width, which eliminates a weird "jitter" effect that sometimes occurred when using them.
Atul Varma