I’ve been working with someone over the last few months recover some of their digital identity lost though what could best be described as a nefarious set of circumstances (I may go into it at some point, with their permission). It’s scary how much you can lose. Anyway, part of this work has been doing some careful scraping of old profiles and accounts, which has lead me to remember two things:

Don’t ever write your own HTML or XML parser, and especially not with regex. 1.

Okay fine, just this once, but don’t say I didn’t warn you, future self.

I’ve never been that into frontend development or design, but the industry has got utterly wild in the time I last checked. Here’s a screenshot for just a snippet of source for a famous image sharing service:

That’s twenty two wrapped block-level elements to render a single image and a two-line comment on a page, with nothing else. At some point this sort of obfuscated junk wraps around and becomes art itself. I’d print that onto a bed spread.