[jsword-devel] Using native browsers in BibleDesktop

[DM Smith]

I was surprised that Java's displaying of HTML has degraded under 1.5.
There are a lot of workarounds in the HTML that we construct for 
BibleDesktop
(which I thought that we could eliminate under 1.5) and it would be 
really nice
to use a real browser.

Joe has done surveys of alternates in the past and I recently took a 
look at
where it is all going. While my survey is not anywhere as thorough as Joe's
it seems to me that development of a Java base browser is being dropped
in favor of embedding a user's default native browser.

Joe has started playing with JDIC (Java Desktop Integration Components)
Browser component. I have taken a look at his effort and I see that there
are two basic challenges. The first is that we need to be able to provide a
protocol handler to do linking to and within Sword modules. This looks
like it is very doable. Joe has almost finished this.

The other challenge is that the embedded JDIC browser is a heavy weight and
does not play well with Swing. I have not looked, but I bet that all other
implementations of embedding the browser will have the same problem.

So the question that this poses is "With what shall we re-write 
BibleDesktop?"

And "Do we want to go this route?"