Quite a few applications these days install their help and instructions files locally in HTML format, probably so illustrations etc. can be displayed without the need for humongous PDF’s or online links.
Has anyone heard of such a thing as a super-stripped-down “browser” which serves no other purpose than reading and displaying such local HTMLs? It would probably load and display much faster than even the lightest real browser, and I’m (probably in my technical ignorance) more than a little surprised that I’ve never heard of it…
I can see that if it doesn’t exist, one of the biggest unsolved problems would be file association … how on earth would it distinguish between local files which it can access and web files which it can’t find?
I think you almost answered your own question, by framing the question I changed it slightly and googled HTML viewer and got tons of hits so I’m sure there will be something there, http://www.google.com/search?q=HTML+viewer. You could probably refine the search like freeware html viewer, or offline html viewer.
Thanks, David. I did Google this, shortly after posting, and skimmed through maybe the first half page of hits. What I found seemed mostly geared to viewing saved web pages on portable devices, plus developer’s tools for designing web pages in a sort of semi-WYSIWYG manner.
Seems a shame to have to load all of Firefox (or whatever) just to view something that’s already local, but that file-association thing is probably the barrier.
Two ideas for possibly getting around that, by the way, for any developers seeing this. What about different file extensions for online and offline HTML files (as in when saving online pages), so that separate associations could be set up for each? Failing that (and this would be more for the MS people), what if associations could be more complex, if-this-fails-then-do-that the same as some of avast’s functions. That way, if the reader couldn’t find the file locally (or simpler yet, if its location was http… rather than C:.… ), it would then call up the browser.
Well if you use IE you can save web pages as .mht format this saves the web page and all associated images etc inside one archive file (the .mht format) now if you clicked on that IE would normally be the executable associated with that file type. You could just as easily associate it with some form of off-line browser if it recognises and can handle the .mht format.
I think the different file type for on-line and off-line html file is a total non starter as you would then need to have an approved format for off-line files (requires wc3 standards approval, etc.).
Web designers are only concerned with on-line content, so your browser or another application would have to convert the on-line html file format to an off-line format, a real mess.
Add to that there is virtually zero standardisation on how they store html pages in the browser cache, just compare the firefox browser cache with IE’s Temp Internet Files and they are totally different. Then you have to a) let the browser know you want to use this for off-line viewing b) it would then have to convert that to the off-line format and I guess store it in a different location from the normal browser cache and c) any associated image files would have to be moved/saved too.
Me I leave my computer on all day (with a tight power settings), shutting down at night. When I have booted my system, I load my browser, email application and anti-spam applications and they stay on all day to. So I don’t constantly have start my browser, etc.
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