Thanks for working on this! entity.blogdns.net is not responding at the moment, but what you describe sounds very nice. Please send your patches (output of 'svn diff') to me (dean at brettle dot com). Assuming they look OK and Joe doesn't object, I'll apply the patches to the trunk and commit sometime in the near future. Note however that when Joe's similar work in the 2.1 branch gets merged into the trunk, there is a good chance we will just opt to copy over your changes, since attempting to merge would probably be more trouble than it's worth. That said, I think we should compare the 2 approaches to see if there are any benefits to be gained from some sort of hybrid.
--Dean