Just a matter of time

I'm really happy with my latest creation: htmlite. It's an html toolkit for parsing, manipulating and generating html. It's currently part of the tooling that powers this site.

I'm not proud of it because it's technically interesting or anything, but because it took a lot of patience to work through. The core of the library is an implementation of the HTML tokenization spec. It's quite long for starters. At the time of writing, it's described as a state machine with 80 states. To someone unfamiliar with specs like this, it took a while to understand how to read the thing. It also takes some creative thinking to translate some of the spec operations into code.

But it was worth it! Parsing HTML was something I once thought I wasn't smart enough to do properly. That is no longer the case and it feels wonderful. It didn't take some big revelation or jump in intelligence. It was just a matter of time.