mh-ssg VS Highlight.js

This week, I've published my 1st package on npm - mh-ssg - a static site generator CLI.

I also worked on another project, mh-ssg, and added tests to this project as well. I created unit tests for a function called processFolder(). This function accepts an input folder path, output folder path and stylesheet URL. I created two unit tests, one which tests when a valid input folder containing files is passed to the function and one which tests when a non-existent folder is passed to the function. The function logs a message to the console depending on how many files are saved in the output folder, so the tests I wrote tested for these console logs.

For this lab, I picked Jest as the testing tool for mh-ssg. This is a popular Javascript testing framework thanks to its simplicity and ease of usage.

To maintain the quality of source code, I added a formatter and a linter for my project.

Throughout the previous week, I was exploring Docusaurus and found that they have a feature to support static files. I find this feature very useful for any static site generator since images, favicons, stylesheets, etc. are very common parts of a webpage. Therefore, I decided to add this feature in my tool.

As new features are added to the tool, I realized that the logic is not clear anymore and some parts were duplicated, making it inefficient and hard to maintain. This time, I decided to focus on removing those duplications by moving the statements to the appropriate place and extracting function for reusability. All the refactoring was done through a single commit with the help of git rebase.

Luke also implemented the same feature for my project. His code in general was good but I suggested some changes including separating modules and combining functions to remove code duplicates.

After looking through my classmates' projects, I decided to work on Minh Hang's static site generator and filed an issue to her repo.

In the last update, my friend - Dustin - helped to add Markdown as a valid input for my tool. Markdown syntaxes are different from HTML syntaxes and he has worked on converting some of them. This time I decided to add two more:

I've been sending a lot of pull requests but this was actually my first time receiving one 😄 and Dustin was my first contributor. He also proposed to add Markdown support for my tool and to parse all the headings, bold, italics and link from markdown into the corresponding HTML tags. I scanned through the pull request and found some minor issues, including missing new feature in documentation and missing the handling of the output file name. We also had different opinions about the implementation of .txt file and .md file. However after discussion, we came to agreement and I approved his changes.

> it was designed to resemble C#

I actually first heard of Vala just a few days ago when I was looking at a C#-related PR[1] for highlight.js:

> This fails the tests as the Vala default.txt is recognized now as C#. However, Vala is very close in syntax to C#, and the default.txt also seems to be valid C# so not sure what to do about this.

[1] https://github.com/highlightjs/highlight.js/pull/3906

About GitHub Source - https://github.com/highlightjs/highlight.js/issues/1224

Let's get started by installing the highlight js

Luckily, implementing syntax highlighting in our simple code editor is easy with the use of external libraries. There are several JavaScript libraries available, such as Prism and Highlight.js. For our editor, we'll use Prism since it's easy to use and supports a wide range of programming languages.

They do actually document the recommended path in their GitHub docs: https://github.com/highlightjs/highlight.js#GettingTheLibrar...

The templates grabs Markdown file data with XMLHttpRequest and converts it to HTML with https://showdownjs.com/ . Classless styles are done with https://picocss.com/ and code block syntax highlighting is done with https://highlightjs.org/ .

GitHub repo: https://github.com/dandalpiaz/markdown-pages

My search for a third-party syntax highlighter brought me to highlight.js. ctil converts text (.txt) and Markdown (.md) to generated HTML (.html) files, so I want the generated HTML files to support syntax highlighting. highlight.js can be used as HTML Tags by using a Content Delivery Network, CDN, so I was able to add highlight.js by adding the following lines to the generated HTML files:

The real magic is what happens once you generate the syntax trees; at that point, you can modify them with the existing plugins (or make you own, if you really want to). For instance, I use a plugin to add specific css classes to certain elements so they integrate better with the visual design of the website another to add code highlighting with highlight.js and some others for generating a js object from the frontmatter of a Markdown file and to add support for Github flavored Markdown. I could do a lot more with these, like add support for videos, embeds and more, but for now this is enough for a simple preview.

pre is for a block of preformatted text, so spaces are preserved, and the font can be monospaced. Another element is code for programming codes. Notice that code doesn't offer code highlighting; for this, use JavaScript + CSS code, like Highlight.js.