Kathy Walrath's Blog

Take the Swing Text Survey (Please!)

One of the most wanted Swing bug fixes is for 4296022 [html4.x support within a JEditorPane]. We are planning to resolve this problem in the Dolphin (J2SE 7.0) release.

To make sure all the important features are implemented we need your help. We've created a survey to help us to understand your needs better:

    http://java.sun.com/webapps/survey/display?survey_id=5370

(It might take about fifteen minutes to finish it.)

Thank you for your time.

    Igor

Comments

• Given the success of xhtmlrenderer and it's high rate of improvement (by at least one existing Sun employee) it seems that at a high level there is quite a lot of overlap. xhtmlrenderer will work with java 1.4 as well. If the overlap is true I'd prefer it if Sun would just close 4296022 with the reason "xhtmlrenderer".
  Cheers.
  

  Posted by: markswanson on November 17, 2005 at 05:56 PM

• JEditorPAne is "A text component to edit various kinds of conten", while XHTMLRenderer is just a renderer.
  I am not used to those components, but the matter here is to have a pure java component to *edit* HTML or XHTML content.
  Does XHTMLRenderer offer such a feature? Could be reasonable to use part of XHTMLRenderer to offer edit capabilities in JEditorPane? Or are really sun swing team worrying about a non existent problem?
  

  Posted by: ildella on November 18, 2005 at 02:11 AM

• I took part in XHTMLRenderer couple years ago. AFAIR it is based on JeditorPane, just enhanced for Web browsing (javascript, links, applets, cookies, context menus). I wished at that time that my code would go back into Sun sources (and be distributed to millions of user 8-) ).

  There were plans to add support for using Mozilla JRenderer, but at that time it was hardly usable mess (much lower quality than JEditorPane). The problem was in "tidying" HTML, JTidy worked bad. I suspect that this still is.

  Posted by: wwk_killer on November 18, 2005 at 05:04 AM

• It's very nice of you to create such a survey and invite people to it. I had voted for this bug too.

  However there are other important bugs in Swing that are not being taken seriously by SUN, such as

  http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4834918
  http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4816922

  About the first bug, please fix this or just throw out JInternalFrames altogether. It really saddens me when simple problems like the ones above, cannot be solved, may be due SUN's own bureaucracy.

  Posted by: swapnonil on November 18, 2005 at 10:07 AM

• As much as I appreciate the attention being paid to Flying Saucer (the official name for the XHTMLRenderer project) I feel I shoudl clarify a few things.

  First: Flying Saucer does not support Javascript, malformed HTML, and cannot be used for editing. It is purely a renderer and can only handle valid and well-formed XHTML (well, really any XML if you have the right stylesheet). This is all by design, as well. We intentionally limited the scope so that it would be feasible to build by a small team.

  Second: Flying Saucer does not use the JEditorPane at all (either by subclassing or stealing code) and there is very little overlap between the two. Their internal structures are completely different because FS was never intended for editing. FS will probably always be slower than JEditorPane as well because it aims for compliance with XHTML and CSS 2.1 over speed (though it has gotten a lot faster in the last few months).

  Flying Saucer has always been intended for showing developer supplied content embedded a Swing app. Think iTunes music store, not a webbrowser. If you want full fidelity with the random HTML that's out on the web then I suggest you look at JDIC. If you want the ability to edit then you want to use the JEditorPane. I think all three serve different purposes. The great thing about Java is that we don't have to choose. We can have them all. :)

  
  -Josh
  

  Posted by: joshy on November 18, 2005 at 11:06 AM

• The Swing HTML package is not handling some basic editing functions right, e.g. inserting/removing content across different types of elements. It's important to have these basic function working before this package can move further.

  JDK 1.4 introduces some new functions like, setOuterHTML, setInerHTML, etc. These functions are great for helping modifying the document element tree, I hope more convenience functions like these can be introduced in the future.

  Posted by: ctiger on December 01, 2005 at 04:02 PM

• 
  I know I'm a bit late, but I'd love to respond to swapnonil's comment. At Sun we definitely take bugs seriously, and your feedback as to what's important is highly valuable. In the case of these two bugs, they were both, in fact, on our list for Mustang. Unfortunately, sometimes technical factors get involved that make resolving them take longer than expected. In the case of 4816922, we made major enhancements to Swing Drag and Drop for Mustang, as outlined in my recent blog entry, and this bug was slated to be part of those enhancements. Unfortunately it didn't make it, as the investigation took longer than expected. I describe this in more detail in a comment that I posted below my blog entry. As such, we're continuing the investigation and will get the fix out as soon as possible.

  
  All this to say: although it sometimes takes longer than hoped for, we continue to work hard to fix the things that are important to you. Thanks!
  

  Posted by: shan_man on January 12, 2006 at 01:20 PM

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