Zubashev Stepan's blog

TIL: HTMLCollections are live-collection. What does it mean? Look. Imagine you have HTML like this:

<div>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</div>

Then you want to find all its <br/>s:

const collection  = $0.getElementsByTagName('br');

Thus far, everything is obvious, right? Ok, let’s add one more <br/>:

$0.append(document.createElement('br'));

So, now have three of them. Let’s read the same collection element again:

Whoa… It was updated too. Why? HTMLCollection is a “live” collection:

An HTMLCollection in the HTML DOM is live; it is automatically updated when the underlying document is changed. For this reason it is a good idea to make a copy (e.g., using Array.from) to iterate over if adding, moving, or removing nodes.

• Mozilla

I ran into an issue. Code like this:

.link:hover {
  filter: brightness(1.5);
}

… worked perfectly on a colored icon but had no effect on a text label. It turned out that the label used the color #000. brightness() is a purely mathematical function that multiplies the R, G, and B values by the given factor. This makes no difference for pure black, since 0 * anything = 0.

There are multiple password managers like 1pass, KeePass, and LastPass. Most of them have browser extensions. They are great. But they alter the page behavior, including HTML. Sometimes we need to prevent them from doing that.

Many years ago, people just did this:

<input autocomplete="off"

Now it doesn’t work. These extensions don’t respect this attribute. You might have seen this one:

<input data-lpignore="true"

It doesn’t work either (at least not with KeePass)

I came up with a simple and pretty silly solution:

<input type="text" onfocus="event.target.type='password'"

And it works ;-) The extensions don’t care about text-inputs. And they are not smart enough to detect new controls. At least for now.

upd: It helped with KeePass, but didn’t work out with 1Password.

The idea

In June, I started learning Rust. Why? Just out of curiosity. A system-level language with a lot of syntax sugar, new patterns, and approaches. So, I started with the Rust Book, got through half of it, and decided to build something real.

My previous blog was made with PHP 5.5 more than ~8 years ago. It wasn’t bad, but I completely quit PHP. I didn’t want to touch that old codebase. So I came to the conclusion: why not write a new one, this time in Rust?

Here it is. You’re welcome ;)

AI

I didn’t want to vibe-code it. However, I didn’t want to face all the obstacles by myself. So I used ChatGPT a lot, for almost every aspect of the development. I turned off Copilot and didn’t use Cursor. Because I wanted to write the blog “myself”. To feel it. At least in some merit. GTP was always in a separate browser tab. More like a helper, not an author.

Rust. First impression

Rust is wonderful, but it’s a system-level language. I had no real experience in this area before. Just a few simple C++ LeetCode problems, which gave me no real C++ knowledge. So it was a real challenge. But I wasn’t completely unarmed. I still remembered something about pointers, the heap, allocation, and other important system-level stuff. Though it was purely theoretical in my mind.

My landings in 2023-2025

Launches are after the break