Hi chocobanana,


> Perhaps gecko, webkit as discussed before to replace
> that nasty mshtml...

Yeah I think this is the best possibility for the future.

But unfortunately these other engines are way behind in the kind of extensibility that I really need to do a proper job. Mshtml.dll has a mechanism in it called IHTMLPainter that makes it pretty easy to make a C++ component that integrates into the browser at a very low level, participating directly in the painting of the page.

The other web platforms just do not have anything similar to this, they have instead focused energy only on things accessible to script code, stuff like the Canvas element. That's great for other types of stuff, but not really for trying to make custom controls like I need to do.

Hopefully in the future this will get better though. In the most recent version of Qt they brought in a version of WebKit that can be used in conjunction with Qt. I was hoping that this might be a good way forward but I took a look at it and the extension hooks are still too primitive, it does allow for a Qt control to be declared as an <object> tag in a page, so there is something there but the controls that way are kind of like an isolated island, I need better integration into the whole page like the mshtml.dll mechanisms provide. For example I need to be able to put down a custom painted background using C++ code, while letting the browser handle the text display in the foreground - that isn't possible with a clunky <object> method but works great in the IHTMLPainter method in mshtml.dll .


> Btw, is the educational version of MoI upgradeable to a
> future commercial version?

Yeah, I think I will set it up to allow that.


- Michael