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Comment by senko | Hacker News Reader

IMHO, compiler construction as an advanced excercise for amateurs is at topic that has been beaten to death (as OP suggests, there's tons of available materials and projects ranging from high quality not-so-amateur to quick or fun hacks - I'm guilty of one myself).

On the other hand, I would love to see "HTML5 and CSS parsing and rendering for amateurs". Given the state of modern HTML5 and CSS standards, and ignoring compatibility and real-world usage (just like for toy compilers), Let's Build A Browser Engine sounds more tempting than Let's Build a Compiler.

(To preempt "contribute to existing actual real-world engine" suggestions -- while that's worthwhile, it's like saying "contribute to LLVM" to someone looking to write a toy compiler, ie. completely misses the point).

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There's this great series by mbrubeck which sounds like it might be right up your alley: https://limpet.net/mbrubeck/2014/08/08/toy-layout-engine-1.h...

This looks like a great resource, thanks!

This also might be interestings: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowsers...

> Given the state of modern HTML5 and CSS standards, and ignoring compatibility and real-world usage (just like for toy compilers), Let's Build A Browser Engine sounds more tempting than Let's Build a Compiler.

FWIW, current HTML and CSS standards should give you compatibility with real-world usage if you implement them accurately. Of course, for a toy, you may well want to simplify things from what the standard does.

I agree. It's a topic that should die outside maybe posting that one link that aggregates many useful resources on the topic. You probably know the one.

Re HTML5/CSS

Excellent idea! These slways need more work in some way plus have widedpread impact. Amateurs stumbling on improved algorithms might similarly see their work have great impact.

Why should this topic die exactly? I don't understand the hostility. Do you want to keep a fun topic secret?

Not necessarily. It just comes up a whole lot despite mostly not teaching them what they need to know to improve compilers as another commenter pointed out. So, redundant and a bit self-defeating. Other, related topics or an improved version of this one could lead to more real-world results whether hobbyists or professionals pick them up.

I'd love to do some project like this to give me a better understanding of webpage performance.

The high-level abstractions of HTML/CSS are really powerful, but it would be cool to have an understanding of the implications of such designs when writing web applications.

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