💾 Archived View for gaazoh.flounder.online › devlog › 2022-03-03-gemtext.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 02:18:39. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Gemini client devlog 1: Parsing gemtext

I'm completely new to JavaScript, so I figured I'd familiarize myself with the easier task of parsing gemtext and converting gmi documents to HTML.

This feels like a very backwards thing to do.

Solderpunk: Hey y'all the web is bloated and HTML is a mess and JavaScript sucks so I invented gemini:// and gemtext to provide a minimal and sane alternative

me: cool I'll use JavaScript to turn it back into HTML

I kinda understand why seemingly no one has released something like this before. But, hey, given my goal of making a KaiOS browser, I don't really have much of an option, and a lot of people have done very similar things in order to proxy gemini content in HTML pages served on HTTP.

But that's beside the point. I build something in JavaScript and it works.

The gemtext format is straightforward enough that I barely had to think about the algorithm and could focus on how to write it. Yet I had a real thing to work towards that allowed me to do that, not just an artificial exercise as is often the case when getting familiar with a new language.

In the end, I have a parser that handle every bit of the spec, I squashed a few bugs on some edge cases and I don't believe there are any left, and I'm not as afraid as before at tackling the harder bits such as implementing the protocol.

I plan on releasing the code under a free license soon, but in the meantime I asked for a review on Code Review StackExchange (but didn't get an answer yet), so if you're interested you can have a peek at my code there.

Code review request on StackExchange

So far, I sort of get why JS has a bad reputations, but in an attempt to stay positive, I'll list what I did like programming in JavaScript:

Basically nothing needed to get started. Any text editor and web browser are enough to run your code
Integration with the DOM. I feel that a tool can only be affordable by anyone to use (beside other programmers) if it has a GUI, but GUIs are a pain in the ass to make. With JS, just slap a basic HTML page and you have a basic but usable GUI. It's incredibly satisfying to work that way and see your code in action.
Awesome documentation. Those people at Mozilla making MDN deserve a hug.
Great debugging tools. I heard people complain that Firefox is low-tier for it's debugging tools, but I don't have Chrome and found FF developer tools to be great. Complete and works out of the box and easy to use, far ahead of basically any other tool I have used.
Love the object flexibility and syntax, it makes it very easy to work with.
Seamless regex integration makes it quite comfortable working with strings.

In conclusion, JS is OK and I have a parser, yay! Now I just need to build a protocol library, a URL parser, a nice HTML/CSS wrapper, a settings system... Lots of fun times to come!