BaselineLens

🧪 Feature support, decoded. | ✅ Decisions, simplified.

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🌟 Inspiration

Modern web development moves fast—but browser support doesn’t. Developers often use cutting-edge features without realizing they’re unsupported in key environments. We wanted to build a tool that decodes feature support, simplifies decisions, and helps teams ship with confidence. BaselineLens was born from that need: a validator that’s fast, clear, and emotionally intelligent.

🛠️ What it does

BaselineLens scans HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to detect usage of modern web features. It validates each feature against Baseline data to determine cross-browser support, flags risky or unsupported features, and suggests fallback alternatives. It can export results in Markdown, HTML, or JSON, and includes trust badges, fallback logic, and score summaries for reviewer clarity.

🧩 How we built it

We built BaselineLens as a modular C++ CLI tool with:

  • A scanner module for feature extraction
  • A validator module that compares features against preloaded Baseline JSON
  • A fallback module that suggests alternatives
  • Markdown and HTML report generators with auto-launch
  • Flags for demo polish: --export, --html, --json, --quiet, --demo, --score We used MSYS2 for cross-platform compatibility and nlohmann/json for lightweight parsing.

🚧 Challenges we ran into

  • Parsing CLI flags without breaking legacy behavior
  • Ensuring fallback suggestions were meaningful and context-aware
  • Handling file paths and encoding issues across platforms
  • Designing a report format that’s both reviewer-friendly and developer-useful
  • Debugging silent failures when JSON wasn’t loaded correctly

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • A fully working CLI tool with modular architecture
  • Cinematic Markdown and HTML reports with trust badges and fallback logic
  • Auto-launching reports for instant demo clarity
  • A clean README, sample report, and YouTube demo

📚 What we learned

  • How to sequence CLI logic for clarity and flexibility
  • How to design fallback suggestions that feel helpful, not robotic
  • How to polish a Devpost submission with demo power and emotional clarity
  • How to debug cross-platform C++ builds with precision
  • How to build tools that empower others and simplify decisions

🚀 What's next for BaselineLens

  • Add --compare mode to validate two HTML files side-by-side
  • Add --csv export for spreadsheet integration
  • Add --browser flag to auto-launch HTML reports
  • Add support for scanning entire folders
  • Publish as a downloadable binary with installer
  • Share with developer communities and open-source contributors
  • Use BaselineLens in hackathons to validate demo readiness
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