Swing HTML Preview

That the standard Java Swing text components can render HTML is mighty handy. That they're ornery and underdocumented (as far as what HTML tags/attributes and CSS styles they support) is annoying. Essentially, you've got to try things out to see how they'll look.

So I made this little class to make experimentation easier. Run the executable JAR, and you'll get a window with two text areas. The top, editable, will take your raw HTML. The bottom, not edittable, will live-render your HTML, as each keystroke comes in.

Experiment away!

Notes:

Cut, Copy, and Paste keyboard shortcuts seem to work.
Some illegal (or more likely in-the-process-of-being-typed) HTML chokes the renderer. Thrown error are silently caught, and a re-render is attempted with each new keystroke. However, as long as there are problems the insertion caret will appear in red and the HTML view may not update.
You probably want to type IMG SRC values elsewhere, then paste them into the right place. Otherwise, each character of the SRC URL as it is being typed will cause slow-timeout fetch errors before the URL is legal.

Swing HTML Preview Files

Executable JAR (created under Java 1.3.1, will probably work elsewhere):

SwingHTMLPreview.jar, 1,926 bytes [Bitzi: F27Y...]

Source:

SwingHTMLPreview.java, 2,647 bytes [Bitzi: I7CJ...]

2001-12-31, gojomo@bitzi.com