Everything you see on this panel is custom-painted by the HTML Renderer, including images and links.
Now you can have the rich format power of HTML on you desktop applications without WebBrowser control and MSHTML.
The library is 100% managed code without any external libraries dependencies.The rendered html has full support for text selection including drag-and-drop and copy to clipboard of rich html and plain text to handle paste operation to editor that support rich or/and plain text.
The core layout engine of the renderer was builded according to CSS Level 2 specification, so you can use Cascading Style Sheets to format your html documents.
There's no big nor small job for the renderer. It's quite fast for small fragments like in the
HtmlLabel
but there's no problem for entire documents like this.It comes in useful presentations:
HtmlPanel
- The control where you are reading this, panel with scrollbarsHtmlLabel
- Same as html panel but without scrollbars and optional auto sizeHtmlToolTip
- For ToolTip with rich htmlCheck the Sample Form to learn more about this three controls
Some extra-standard features
There are a couple of things added to the renderer: Gradients on backgrounds and rounded corners. See the samples on the left to learn more.
On the roadmap
Of course it's not quite finished yet. Here are some of the important things to do.
- Context menu (copy, select, extensible)
- Better performance
- Selection by shift+arrows
- Support downloading images from url
- Support different bullet types
- Better images handling (async download, error image)
- Support of visibility CSS property
- Support of position CSS property
- Support of height and min-height CSS property
- Better error handling
- Handle :hover selector
- Better word wrap, not just whitespace
- Support rtl using lang attribute
- Better HTML tag parsing (optional closing tags)
Vision
- Most complete static HTML Renderer (no java script).
- Commercial web browser performance level.
- Full rich HTML editing capabilities.
- Allow DOM manipulation.