3 ms·

Been using this for years. Mostly really useful. Sometimes tricky to get right since the available APIs are semi-well documented and it's JScript, which is some

Been using this for years. Mostly really useful. Sometimes tricky to get right since the available APIs are semi-well documented and it's JScript, which is some sort of old Internet Explorer-ish version of JavaScript. By the way, there are also HTAs, which are Microsoft HTML Applications. You can create a simple double-clickable GUI with these using only HTML and JScript.

jeroenhd 3y ago
Pretty crazy how Microsoft basically invented the Electron app as HTAs all the way back in 1999. Of course we browsers weren't as capable as they are today, but "I just want a HTML+CSS GUI" had been a solved problem for over ten years when Electron first came out.
- jraph 3y ago
  Yes, and XULRunner allowed this too, using Gecko, Firefox's web engine, to render HTML-like markup specifically designed to build native-like GUIs. Apparently XULRunner was first released in 2006, but Thunderbird, which uses (used?) the same technology, was released as early as 2003, and maybe this was existing in the Mozilla Suite even before.
  - mook 3y ago
    Thunderbird never quite used XULRunner, I think; they always built their own binary (though at some point quite a lot of the shared stuff moved into the XRE stuff). Think of it as they had a fork of Firefox (much like Firefox had a stripped down fork of the SeaMonkey stuff). Also, I think one of the Start Menus (might have been XP‽) was kind of HTA-ish? Not sure about that part, though.
    - jraph 3y ago
      > they always built their own binary > Think of it as they had a fork of Firefox Yep indeed, you are right. Notable projects using actual XULRunner included Songbird (a music player) and BlueGriffon, an WYSIWYG HTML editor (a successor of Nvu and KompoZer, themselves succeeding Netscape Composer). Both released after 2006 indeed. I liked XUL, I strongly believe Mozilla could have dominated the market taken by Electron, had they pushed XULRunner more, and perhaps make it transition to pure HTML, like they did to Firefox's core, because that's what people know and because XUL was a maintenance burden. I think XUL tags made more sense than HTML to build UIs, though, and with XUL, Gecko have had a CSS flex-like mechanism for a long time by the way. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_%28software%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_%28software%29 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueGriffon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueGriffon
      - vidarh 3y ago
        There was an experiment back in the hazy past around that time called Entity that did something similar. It was never complete enough to be a competitor to XULRunner, but it was fascinating for two reasons: 1) You could write event handlers in multiple languages, including C. If you wrote them in C, it spawned gcc and compiled it into a library, and dynamically loaded it... The overall idea of a polyglot runtime like that was fun. 2) #1 is only really weird because this could be done at runtime. One of the demo apps was an editor for the GUI itself, where you could add buttons to the editor, then write that event handler in C, and have it compiled and loaded into the editor itself... It was a fascinating starting point, though full of heavy duty foot guns, and I'm still sad nobody took it further.
        mananaysiempre 3y ago
        > The overall idea of a polyglot runtime like that was fun. Active Scripting, which powers scripts in both WSH and old-school IE including HTAs, is polyglot and extensible. It’s why Active{Perl,Python,Tcl} are called that—the original headline feature (IIUC) was that they integrated with it. It’s also why you could write VBS in IE: IE just passed the text of the script along with the language attribute to AS and let it sort things out. Nobody did ever a C interprerer, though, I think—perhaps because you basically have to speak COM from Active Scripting, and while speaking COM from C is certainly possible it’s nobody’s idea of fun. (An ObjC-like preprocessor/superset could definitely be made and I’ve heard that Microsoft had even entertained the idea at the dawn of time, but instead they went with C++, and I haven’t been able to find any traces of that project.) That’s not to say AS is perfect or even good—the impossibility of caching DISPIDs[1], in particular, seems like a design-sinking goof. And the AS boundary was also why DOM manipulation in IE was so slow. [1] https://ericlippert.com/2003/09/16/why-do-the-script-engines-not-cache-dispatch-identifiers/ https://ericlippert.com/2003/09/16/why-do-the-script-engines...
      - fouc 3y ago
        the best epub reader for desktop I've ever encountered, was epubreader (pre-WebExtension version), I used to launch it as a standalone app with XULRunner.
- mark_and_sweep 3y ago
  Well, you can use IE 9 in HTAs - that browser is plenty capable. :) Been using this as a Windows-only Electron alternative for years.
  - mark_and_sweep 3y ago
    For the curious: Here's a completely unfinished guide to how you might start developing such an application: https://marksweb.site/hta/ https://marksweb.site/hta/ From HTAs, you have access to the file system, the network, the registry, the shell - everything. It might be a bit different than normal web dev, but it's not too bad either.
    - notpushkin 3y ago
      Wow, that's so cool! I played around with making HTAs as a kid and never thought those could be that powerful. (I quickly moved on to topics more exciting to a teenage hacker, like making WinForms apps with some PHP RAD IDE.) Wondering what would it take to port mshta (with all the ActiveX goodies) to other platforms. Maybe it's a little bit late for that, but sounds like it might be a fun project to me.
      - mark_and_sweep 3y ago
        To be honest, in my ideal world, mshta, Electron and the like would be discontinued and, instead, there'd be a cross-desktop-platform HTML/CSS/JS app-runtime (_not a browser!_). This runtime should support a sensible, large subset of modern Web APIs plus a set of cross-OS and OS-specific APIs so it's easy to work with for developers. To be easy to use for users, it should be installed by default on all major consumer-facing OSes. So yeah, it's probably not gonna happen anytime soon...
        hnben 3y ago
        how do you feel about PWA? https://web.dev/progressive-web-apps/ https://web.dev/progressive-web-apps/
      - 3y ago

jeroenhd 3y ago

Pretty crazy how Microsoft basically invented the Electron app as HTAs all the way back in 1999. Of course we browsers weren't as capable as they are today, but "I just want a HTML+CSS GUI" had been a solved problem for over ten years when Electron first came out.

jraph 3y ago
Yes, and XULRunner allowed this too, using Gecko, Firefox's web engine, to render HTML-like markup specifically designed to build native-like GUIs. Apparently XULRunner was first released in 2006, but Thunderbird, which uses (used?) the same technology, was released as early as 2003, and maybe this was existing in the Mozilla Suite even before.
- mook 3y ago
  Thunderbird never quite used XULRunner, I think; they always built their own binary (though at some point quite a lot of the shared stuff moved into the XRE stuff). Think of it as they had a fork of Firefox (much like Firefox had a stripped down fork of the SeaMonkey stuff). Also, I think one of the Start Menus (might have been XP‽) was kind of HTA-ish? Not sure about that part, though.
  - jraph 3y ago
    > they always built their own binary > Think of it as they had a fork of Firefox Yep indeed, you are right. Notable projects using actual XULRunner included Songbird (a music player) and BlueGriffon, an WYSIWYG HTML editor (a successor of Nvu and KompoZer, themselves succeeding Netscape Composer). Both released after 2006 indeed. I liked XUL, I strongly believe Mozilla could have dominated the market taken by Electron, had they pushed XULRunner more, and perhaps make it transition to pure HTML, like they did to Firefox's core, because that's what people know and because XUL was a maintenance burden. I think XUL tags made more sense than HTML to build UIs, though, and with XUL, Gecko have had a CSS flex-like mechanism for a long time by the way. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_%28software%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_%28software%29 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueGriffon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueGriffon
    - vidarh 3y ago
      There was an experiment back in the hazy past around that time called Entity that did something similar. It was never complete enough to be a competitor to XULRunner, but it was fascinating for two reasons: 1) You could write event handlers in multiple languages, including C. If you wrote them in C, it spawned gcc and compiled it into a library, and dynamically loaded it... The overall idea of a polyglot runtime like that was fun. 2) #1 is only really weird because this could be done at runtime. One of the demo apps was an editor for the GUI itself, where you could add buttons to the editor, then write that event handler in C, and have it compiled and loaded into the editor itself... It was a fascinating starting point, though full of heavy duty foot guns, and I'm still sad nobody took it further.
      - mananaysiempre 3y ago
        > The overall idea of a polyglot runtime like that was fun. Active Scripting, which powers scripts in both WSH and old-school IE including HTAs, is polyglot and extensible. It’s why Active{Perl,Python,Tcl} are called that—the original headline feature (IIUC) was that they integrated with it. It’s also why you could write VBS in IE: IE just passed the text of the script along with the language attribute to AS and let it sort things out. Nobody did ever a C interprerer, though, I think—perhaps because you basically have to speak COM from Active Scripting, and while speaking COM from C is certainly possible it’s nobody’s idea of fun. (An ObjC-like preprocessor/superset could definitely be made and I’ve heard that Microsoft had even entertained the idea at the dawn of time, but instead they went with C++, and I haven’t been able to find any traces of that project.) That’s not to say AS is perfect or even good—the impossibility of caching DISPIDs[1], in particular, seems like a design-sinking goof. And the AS boundary was also why DOM manipulation in IE was so slow. [1] https://ericlippert.com/2003/09/16/why-do-the-script-engines-not-cache-dispatch-identifiers/ https://ericlippert.com/2003/09/16/why-do-the-script-engines...
    - fouc 3y ago
      the best epub reader for desktop I've ever encountered, was epubreader (pre-WebExtension version), I used to launch it as a standalone app with XULRunner.
mark_and_sweep 3y ago
Well, you can use IE 9 in HTAs - that browser is plenty capable. :) Been using this as a Windows-only Electron alternative for years.
- mark_and_sweep 3y ago
  For the curious: Here's a completely unfinished guide to how you might start developing such an application: https://marksweb.site/hta/ https://marksweb.site/hta/ From HTAs, you have access to the file system, the network, the registry, the shell - everything. It might be a bit different than normal web dev, but it's not too bad either.
  - notpushkin 3y ago
    Wow, that's so cool! I played around with making HTAs as a kid and never thought those could be that powerful. (I quickly moved on to topics more exciting to a teenage hacker, like making WinForms apps with some PHP RAD IDE.) Wondering what would it take to port mshta (with all the ActiveX goodies) to other platforms. Maybe it's a little bit late for that, but sounds like it might be a fun project to me.
    - mark_and_sweep 3y ago
      To be honest, in my ideal world, mshta, Electron and the like would be discontinued and, instead, there'd be a cross-desktop-platform HTML/CSS/JS app-runtime (_not a browser!_). This runtime should support a sensible, large subset of modern Web APIs plus a set of cross-OS and OS-specific APIs so it's easy to work with for developers. To be easy to use for users, it should be installed by default on all major consumer-facing OSes. So yeah, it's probably not gonna happen anytime soon...
      - hnben 3y ago
        how do you feel about PWA? https://web.dev/progressive-web-apps/ https://web.dev/progressive-web-apps/
    - 3y ago