| HTML Viewer Publication |
They act like a web browser, displaying a main window where end users can navigate through your website and read the different HTML pages. The main difference with Self-Extracting publications is that the source files of your website are not unpacked to the user's hard disk. HTML Executable creates a single executable file: end users just need to run it to open the browser's main window. As explained above, this window is designed to be like all standard web browsers, because many users are familiar with that interface style: they can find some useful additional navigation features (search, print preview, copy, favorites) in addition to the traditional navigation buttons (back, forward, home, refresh, print...). Besides HTML Viewer publications are stand-alone: even if your end users have no Web browser, they can still view your publication without any problem! Moreover, HTML Viewer publications do not require any file to be first locally extracted (except some file types like Flash movies, PDF files or for any ActiveX plug-ins). They read the necessary data directly and silently from the program's memory: thus end users cannot access the source of your HTML data and files. Your HTML documents are safe and cannot be copied without your authorization. HTML Executable also provides you with several ways to protect your HTML documents. HTML Viewer publications have their own built-in HTML viewer. Although this internal viewer can not compete with large Web browsers like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, it is generally enough for traditional websites that do not require special features like DHTML, JavaScript, etc... However, you can substitute JavaScript with HEScript.
The HTML Viewer engine supports most of the HTML 3.2 specifications with many additional popular HTML 4 enhancements. Many Cascading Style Sheet properties are also supported. The following list shows you the main supported features:
The following features are not supported because they are too complex and for the simple reason that our HTML Viewer engine needs to remain small enough:
A stand-alone program able to display HTML pages itself is not small: the code necessary to run a HTML Viewer publication takes about 1.6 Mb uncompressed (without compressed HTML files). This is relatively small compared to the size of other web browser distributions. Anyway, this is still large for small websites. This is the main reason why the code necessary to run HTML Viewer publications was put in a single external library file called the HTML Viewer Runtime Module. This module is a DLL file required by HTML Viewer publications to run properly: it is similar to Visual Basic DLL runtimes, Adobe Flash player, Adobe AIR, Windows Installer runtime, Microsoft .net framework, Java Runtime, etc... Now you have several possibilities for different scenarios:
In any case, you can decide which solution is the best for you. If the size does not matter, then it is better that you merge the runtime module without requiring that it be installed. |