December 07, 2010
First semester in college marks the beginning of programming in more official terms than ever before. And with C language at the front, I cannot imagine it getting more official. It was a time when we were given introductory lectures on HTML. And it was this time that one of the lecturers talked about how a program would work that understands all the HTML code written and displays the web page accordingly and so beautifully or in coding an HTML browser.
Well, on those terms I was well fascinated about making such a program in Visual Basic. But held on, the condition was developing it using C. While after then, some C lectures later, the first semester Mini-Project popped out into the scene and there I was, all setup with an idea to make a basic HTML Interpreter. The challenge wasn’t much of the C language, but lied in using the Windows API to create all sorts of Windows, formatting and displaying text and related stuff. Idea seemed clear, about how to read files and the structure of the same, and the mechanism of flagging text and displaying them according to the enclosing tags. These routines never had technical names until I read Internet Explorer Development references, and then I knew the process was called Pre-Parsing. So I had my own Pre-parsing algorithm followed by a sort of messy text displaying mechanism using all kinds of fonts and text API functions of Win32 library. Text was done, when I thought about including image tag functionality in the same. BUT, already too big for the first semester?