Internet Explorer Based Publications (or IE publications) are feature-rich publications: they rely on the WebBrowser ActiveX control which is part of Microsoft Windows itself, and thus they use the MSHTML rendering engine, like Microsoft Internet Explorer.
This means that websites that are compatible with Internet Explorer can be turned into compiled self-running websites (.exe files) thanks to HTML Executable, and keep their functionality.
IE publications act like Internet Explorer, displaying a main window where end users can navigate through your website and read the different HTML pages. The main difference with Internet Explorer is that the source HTML files of your website are not unpacked to the user's hard disk. Moreover, several options let you protect your HTML source code: for instance, the context menu with the "Show Source code" command can be disabled without any JavaScript trick.
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 behave like Internet Explorer and any standard web browser, 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...).
Moreover, IE publications do not require any file to be first locally extracted (except some file types like Flash movies, PDF, FLV 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.
All interesting features of Internet Explorer are also available in IE publications built with HTML Executable: in addition to the latest HTML features, you have support for DHTML, JavaScript, ActiveX controls...
IE publications are based on the Microsoft WebBrowser control. Note that you do not need any knowledge about the WebBrowser control in order to use HTML Executable!
This ActiveX control is provided by Microsoft to developers who want to add browser functionality to their applications. It uses the MSHTML engine like Internet Explorer. For further information about the WebBrowser control, see this page Reusing the WebBrowser Control (Internet Explorer - WebBrowser).
When an IE publication is run, it creates its own custom protocol (similar to HTTP, FTP, etc...) in order to communicate with the WebBrowser control. In other words, an IE publication works like a small server combined with a client (the main window allowing users to navigate through the HTML pages).
Your website is then available as if it was on a server, except that no Internet connection is necessary!
Finally, IE publications do not require Internet Explorer itself on recent Windows versions (actually starting with Windows 98). The Webbrowser component and the MSHTML engine are always shipped with Windows.
Compiled publications currently work with Internet Explorer versions 4.0+ to 8.0. For security reasons, IE7 or IE8 are recommended.
| If you want to create a real stand-alone publication that does not require any third-party component, you should consider creating a HTML Viewer publication. |
Even if IE publications use the WebBrowser control, the code necessary to run them takes about 1 Mb uncompressed (without compressed 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 IE publications was put in a single external library file called the IE Runtime Module. This module is a DLL file required by IE 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 IE 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.
