StarWeb dev log #2

The client could fetch static files but couldn’t render them. Starweb finally has a browser called Starmap! The first version wasn’t much: a minimal parser splitting tags and attributes on whitespace, and a couple CSS properties. Only one page could be loaded at a time; it wasn’t much of a browser, but I wanted to at least render something.

The whitespace-splitting parser didn’t last long. It broke when an attribute value contained a space, which style="..." does constantly. So I rewrote it into a proper scanner that walks the tag character by character and actually respects quotes. That also made it easy to start picking up attributes I wasn’t tracking before: id, style (parsed into real properties instead of just stored as text), and type, value, and placeholder for form inputs. Nothing renders them yet, but the data’s there.

CSS grew from a couple properties to something you can work with: padding and margin per side, width, height, border-width, border-color, font-size, display, each with its own inheritance rule so one style doesn’t just blindly overwrite another. Headings finally scale too; h1 down to h6 each get their own font-size multiplier instead of rendering at the same size as everything else. Pages could finally pull in external styling too, via <link rel="stylesheet">: the fetcher walks the parsed page for stylesheet links, resolves them against the current URL, and fetches each one as a secondary request before the CSS gets parsed.

The layout change with the biggest visible impact was inline flow. Up to this point, every tag forced a new line, so a paragraph with a link in the middle of it rendered as three separate lines. Spans, links, buttons, and form controls now sit on the same line instead. <input> also stopped incorrectly behaving like a container element, since it shouldn’t be able to hold children.

Then I added tabs. Each tab now owns its own URL, page, style, and fetch state. The window title and each tab’s label now follow the page’s <title>, falling back to the host and path if the page didn’t set one. I also swapped the default OS window frame for custom traffic-light controls (because I’m on a Mac and that’s how Chrome does it; sorry if it looks wrong on Linux or Windows, I haven’t tested yet). And also, resizing works correctly since the first version.

By this point, the browser source had grown to 1700+ lines of code, holding everything: parsing, fetching, theme, and rendering. I split the browser into modules, leaving the main file responsible only for booting up and driving the UI loop.

Woah, that was a lot, but I managed to do it in 3 days? idk how to count it because my sleep schedule is so cooked that I often worked at night and went to sleep at 4 am.