HTML Viewer publications or ebooks 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 other 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.

How it works

HTML Executable combines your website source files and a built-in web browser into a single executable file: end users just need to run it to open the ebook-publication. 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 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. Furthermore, 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 cannot 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 JavaScript, DHTML, HTML 5, 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 Resources|Show Main Demonstration" menu command accessible with in HTML Executable.

About the HTML Viewer engine

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 out-of-the-scope of our basic HTML Viewer engine:

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 IE publication.

Please keep in mind that the HTML Viewer engine is small and it cannot compete with modern web browsers like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. The primary goal of the HTML Viewer engine is to display simple documents. In particular, even if HTML Executable is Unicode-enabled, the HTML Viewer engine may have troubles with some encoding format. If your website is not properly rendered, you should consider creating an IE publication.