Learning HTML was too hard so I made a compiler instead
austinhenley.com
austinhenley.com
In fact I think it is easier now than ever: cross-browser issues are much less of an issue, and grid and flexbox have made layout easier.
"Layout can be tricky" is a... slight understatement? These days almost all web layout is handled through CSS, which means multiple layers of flex and grid, yes, along with axes and media queries and unit scales, pseudo classes, inheritance and priority, animations, transitions, gradients, shorthands, variables... and all of that is before adding in frameworks like Bootstrap or transpilers like Sass or abstractions like tailwind and other newcomers.
Remember how many years it took major browser vendors to reach a decent score on the ACID tests? (https://www.acidtests.org/) That was before flexbox and it was already insanely difficult to properly render CSS. It's gotten orders of magnitude more complex since then.
Cross browser issues are more of an issue than ever, since nobody uses CSS alone anymore there's different permutations of layout engines, permissions, web APIs, JS features, etc.
It's... just not simpler. You used to be able to learn nearly all of CSS in a week or so. Then over the last decade or so, I've been unable to even discover new features, much less keep up with them. Granted I'm getting old too, but man, it's really not a simple language.
Markdown is somewhat simple, but even writing a parser for that is hard. CSS and the DOM are waaaaaay complex. There's a reason there's only like three actual parsers for them (Blink, Webkit, Gecko).
You don't need all of that to build most websites, and certainly not to get started. I'm familiar with all of that but I don't remember most of it — I just look it up again or re-learn it as needed.
> and all of that is before adding in frameworks like Bootstrap or transpilers like Sass or abstractions like tailwind and other newcomers.
Yeah, don't do any of that until you've mastered basic CSS layouts.
> You used to be able to learn nearly all of CSS in a week or so.
You can still learn as much in a week as before, and you don't need to learn it all to start being productive. If you want to be a professional web developer, then yes, expect to spend more that a week learning CSS; if you just want to build your own blog or hobby site, then you can learn enough in a week to build a nice site. CSS is not a simple language, but the basics are simple, it's easy to get started, and the learning curve is not too steep in my opinion.
> my website layout would shift around in seemingly unpredictable ways when I added more content
Yeah, that can happen if you build tricky layouts. Doesn't happen if you keep it simple.
> The tags were cryptic.
Wot? They are mostly plain initialisms or acronyms. Even 'div' which everyone says 'what the fuck does that even mean?' just stands for "document division".
Yeah. That’s the pivotal part. The story is about where that pivot took him.
I’ve always been fascinated by interpreters and compilers. I really enjoyed reading crafting interpreters and the NAND2Tetris course (you build a little toy language and assembler!)
> Then in high school, I joined the business club which had competitive C++ events.
What kind of high school has a business club with competitive C++? Is/was this common? I graduated 4 years ago from a school in the Bay Area and the closest we had was FIRST robotics or a Data Structures and Algorithms class (which we had to beg for...)