Roger Brinkley's Blog

Why the JEditorPane is important to the JavaHelp ContentViewer

This dependency has been, according to several, the major drawback in using JavaHelp. While browsers continued to enhance their rendering capabilities with HTML 4.x support, Cascading Style Sheets 2.x support, XML, XHTML, and plugins, the JavaHelp ContentViewer continued to use HTML 3.2 tags and simple CSS 1.0 support. Rendering improvements were made over the years and a meaningful presentation could be authored but the capbailities were less than desireable for some authors.

The Java Client Group is now looking at planning for the Dolphin release and is very much interested in making changes to the text handling packages in the JDK release. They have a survey where they want to know what text rendering features are most important to you and in the JavaHelp context this means you, the help author.

Specifically, they want to know the importance of:

• HTML 4.x and CSS 2.x
• XHTML 1.x and CSS 2.x
• XML and CSS 2.X
• Look and feel consistency
• Printing Support
• Native browser rendering
• Using custom rendering
• JavaScript support

This is a rare opportunity for the online help authoring community to participate in the development of the swing text components and I urge all help authors, even if you don't use JavaHelp, to take 15 minutes of your time to fill out the survey. The future plans of JavaHelp and what content rendering capabilities are available depends on this survey. Your input as a help author is invaluable and unique in the industry. I'm hopeful that many of you will participate.

Comments

• Having filled in the survey, I have a slightly off-topic question (still relating to JavaHelp)... Any chance of a fix for this issue:
  http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=521583&messageID=2494166

  I couldn't find a related bug report on the bug database however, maybe I used incorrect search criteria. Anyway, in brief, when JavaHelp is embedded in a Swing application that would otherwise shutdown gracefully (after disposing all windows) when JavaHelp isn't used, as soon as you use JavaHelp (say by consulting a help topic), the application just keeps running, with System.exit() being the only solution (not very safe if you have other unfinished and important threads still running). Any chance of a fix?

  Posted by: chris_e_brown on November 23, 2005 at 01:30 AM

• I haven't seen that particular bug yet but I'll take a look into it when it gets posted. Should be able to get a fix out.
  

  Posted by: brinkley on November 23, 2005 at 08:06 AM

• Having used JEditorPane I feel it's very outdated, doesn't render
  Components as IE does. Also JavaHelp uses ugly icons , that is not acceptable for most modern users!! On the personal front I feel
  Java must also keep up and support CSS 2.0, XML, XHTML, JavaScript
  , printing etc.,
  Sun must know that more and more people are using Swing , and
  they expect these things to be there in the first place.
  For my GUI Apps I write my own Help System that's not dependant on JavaHelp!! If Sun provides these add-ons it will definitely help
  the Java Developer community in a big way. What do you think?

  Posted by: sound14 on November 28, 2005 at 08:01 AM

• I agree. A good html browser and editor are a must have for java. This needs real investment.

  Posted by: bblfish on February 09, 2006 at 01:28 AM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.