HTML Viewer publications are feature-rich publications: they include their own built-in HTML Viewer and do not require any external Web browser, ActiveX control nor third-party component in order to run. In order words, they are stand-alone programs that can be run under any Windows version in compliance with the minimum system requirements.
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.
| Some of the possibilities of this HTML Viewer engine are available in the main demonstration: use the "Help|Main Demonstration" menu command in HTML Executable. |
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:
Cascading Stylesheets
Frames
Bitmap, GIF, JPEG, and PNG Images
Animated GIFs
Transparent images
Left and right floating images
Image sizing attributes
Client side image maps
PNG images with alpha channel (partial transparency)
Large HTML files
HTML Tables
HTML Forms
Font sizes, styles, and colors with HTML tags or default settings
Background colors and images
Formatted printing of the HTML document
Print preview
Search engine
Favorites
Copy to clipboard
Subscripts and superscripts
Support for Adobe (R) Flash (SWF) and Acrobat PDF files.
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:
DHTML
JavaScript and VBScript
Java applets
Audio files like MP3 (although you can indirectly play these sounds if you use a third-party ActiveX control). MID and WAV are supported.
| If your website uses one of these features, then you should consider creating an Internet Explorer-based publication. |
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:
The HTML Viewer Runtime module can be merged with the publication .exe file. In other words, you do not need to distribute it separately: if the publication does not find it on the user's computer, it will use the viewer merged within its data to run. So this is exactly like if there was no runtime module at all.
Merging the runtime module makes your publications larger (it adds about 1 Mb to the .exe final size). If your website is large, then the size of the runtime module may be negligible compared to the size of the compressed website files. However, there are two additional cases:
if your website is small, the publication will be larger due to the size of the runtime module.
if you plan to distribute several publication files, then it is probably not necessary that the runtime module is merged with each publication file.
Not merging the runtime module results in smaller publications (in this case the code added to the .exe file takes only about 80kb!).
You can distribute the runtime module along with your publication files. Setup programs for runtime modules are available for public download and free distribution.
If the runtime module is not merged and not found on the user computer, the publication will show a message box with instructions (that you can modify of course) about how to get and install the runtime module.
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.
