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 versions (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.
How does it work?
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: consequently end users cannot access to the source of your HTML data and files. Your HTML documents are safe and cannot be copied without your authorization (HTML Executable provides you also with several ways to protect your HTML documents).
About the HTML Viewer engine
HTML Viewer publications have their own built-in HTML viewer. Although this internal viewer can 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... (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 enough small:
- 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 this feature, then you should consider creating an Internet Explorer-based publication. |
About the HTML Viewer Runtime Module
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 files). This is relatively small compared to the sizes of the other web browsers' 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 program file called the HTML Viewer Runtime Module. This module is a program that allows HTML Viewer publications to be run: it works like Visual Basic DLL runtimes, the Macromedia Flash player, Windows Installer runtime, etc...
When you run a publication, the latter will simply launch the HTML Viewer Runtime module which will open the publication and display it.
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 into smaller publications (in this case the code added to the .exe file takes only about 70kb!).
You can then distribute the runtime module along with your publication files (HTML Executable has ready-to-use Setup programs to install runtime modules), put it on your website for download, or even put a link to the HTML Executable homepage where the latest versions of our runtime modules are always freely available for download.
If the runtime module is not merged, and it is not available on the user computer, the publication will display a message (that you can modify of course) with instructions 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 having it to be installed.
