HTML Rendering Engine

[Ben Rubinstein]

on 7/7/02 7:09 am, Dan Shafer at dan at gui.com wrote:

> has anyone had any success either writing or hooking up an existing
> HTML rendering engine to Revolution?

on 8/7/02 3:00 pm, Ken Ray at kray at sonsothunder.com wrote:

> It depends on how much of HTML you want to render. Revolution will allow you
> to set the "htmlText" of a field to a chunk of HTML, and it will render it
> accordingly. But only those things that are supported in Revolution fields
> are supported in the htmlText, so you lose out on tables, etc.

I've previously proposed on the 'improve' list that this property should
really be named something else, eg 'styledText'.  It's really the way that
you can set and get the formatted text of a field all in one go (by contrast
with eg HyperCard, where you pretty much need to go character by character).
It just happens that the perfectly sensible format which the developers came
up with to do this was to use embedded codes in the text, and making that
resemble HTML is obviously very convenient.  But naming it the 'htmlText' is
really misleading, and sets up expectations that Rev/MC doesn't (and in my
opinion, shouldn't) deliver (at least not through this channel).

I'd be very interested if anyone had done work with an actual HTML rendering
engine.  Both MacOS (since 8.? 9.?) and Windows have one theoretically
available to other apps.  When I looked at the MacOS one a while ago the API
looked fine, but couldn't find all the headers to access it - and Apple
didn't seem to be making much noise about it.  Has anyone tried using either
of these (not necessarily in Rev/MC)?
 
  Ben Rubinstein               |  Email: benr_mc at cogapp.com
  Cognitive Applications Ltd   |  Phone: +44 (0)1273-821600
  http://www.cogapp.com        |  Fax  : +44 (0)1273-728866