Version 29 of HTML widgets

Updated 2010-06-14 05:02:13 by ZhangWeiwu

There are typically 3 types of usage of an HTML widget in most programing languages or libraries.

1. It can be used to display help and manual documents in an application. In this case, the development team authors HTML document. The feature limits (typically lack of css and javascript) can be workaround by only ship documents that the widget can handle. So tools with small footprint and loads fast are preferred. These tools does not need to handle HTTP protocol beyond being able to open HTML files or strings. This is the major use of HTML widget available today.
2. It can also be used to offer user basic feature to surf the Internet, or as a web browser itself. In such case the tool must be able to handle HTTP protocol; their compatibility requirement and feature requirement must be high. There are two approaches in this direction: build an HTML rendering engine in tcl/tk, as explored by the project tkhtml3, and to embed a web rendering engine, as by TkGecko. Unfortunately both did not manage to reach a production release.
3. If even implemented, it can also offer user editing of rich text content, like that was offered by CK Editor (an HTML editor written in javascript) or Kompozer (an HTML editor based on Mozilla). However none of the known HTML widgets have implementations on this direction.

The following table lists known HTML widgets, all mostly for the 1st type of usage mentioned above.

								Libraries containing an HTML widget or standalone HTML widgets
Project Name	Latest release	HTML	css	image	table	js	sloc	Description
tkhtml3	Alpha till 2009	HTMl 4	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	53,656	By Dan Kennedy, Tkhtml3 as a Tk widget supports HTML, CSS and javascript
tkhtml2 [L1 ]	2002		No	Yes	Yes	No	59,982	By D. Richard Hipp, Tkhtml2 is faster and more lightweight than Tkhtml3
Iwidgets	2010	HTML 3.2		Yes				The library has scrolledhtml widget. Itself is part of incrtcl project.
TkWebView	2009		No	Yes	Yes	No	1344	A script-level widget for displaying HTML, either in a standalone window or embedded in another widget. This product is based on html_display, which is a decade older.
http://www.msen.com/%7Eclif/RP_Updates.html%|%HTML_display%|%	04/1999	HTML 2.0	No	Yes	Yes	No	1067	Supports all HTML/2.0 features, including forms. By 2000, one year after its original author stopped working on this product, Flynt Consulting Services further developed on it and later released it under the new name "TkWebView".
http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/%7Esls/woa/distrib/%|%SNTL%|%	1996							A general Tcl library of procedures containing code for HTML rendering
								Applications that contain their own HTML widgets
Project Name	Latest release	HTML	css	image	table	js	sloc	Description
AlphaTcl WWW menu [L2 ]	12/2008							Effectively a text-only HTML widget which can be used for lynx-like web browsing (all implemented in Tcl). When run under Alphatk, the underlying widget is Tk's text.
								Historical Software Projects no longer available on the Internet
Project Name	Latest release	HTML	css	image	table	js	sloc	Description
TkGecko	concept till 2000	HTML 4						A project to embed gecko engine as a widget
tkhtml	long time ago							written by D. Richard Hipp. The current tkhtml project is a new project under the same name.
chtml of Georage P.S.	09/2004							An HTML widget that parses and renders basic HTML
hush	10/1998							C++ API for Tcl/Tk. Offer many widgets including an HTML widget. Requires Tcl 7.34, Tk 3.6, and TkPixmap extension.
PTUI								A Tkinter-based IDE for Python, not Tcl. It includes an HTML viewer based on text.

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