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Java Swing, 2nd Edition
book

Java Swing, 2nd Edition

by Marc Loy, Robert Eckstein, Dave Wood, James Elliott, Brian Cole
November 2002
Intermediate to advanced
1280 pages
38h 26m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Java Swing, 2nd Edition

Support for HTML

The use of HTML is supported by most Swing components. For example, it is possible to use HTML markup to create multiline and multifont labels:

JLabel label = new JLabel("<html>line 1<p><font color=blue size=+2>" 
                         + "big blue</font> line 2<p>line 3</html>");

There are a number of things to watch out for when taking advantage of Swing’s HTML support:

  • The text is interpreted as HTML only if the first six characters are <html> (case doesn’t matter).

  • The font of components using HTML may not match that of components that don’t.

  • Bad HTML may throw RuntimeExceptions, so test your code thoroughly. (Older SDKs are especially fragile in this respect. SDK 1.2 can’t even handle an unknown tag.)

  • There is no good way to determine if a particular component supports HTML programmatically.

  • XHTML-style self-closing tags (such as <br />) insert a spurious > character into the output, at least as of SDK 1.4.1.

  • SDKs prior to 1.3 are unable to size properly in the presence of <br> tags, so for maximum compatibility use <p> tags instead. Newer SDKs treat the two tags identically.

HTML support keeps improving with each release of Swing, but serious bugs remain. Slightly older releases are riddled with bugs in their HTML implementations. (Versions 1.1 and earlier don’t support HTML at all. The JLabel would be displayed as 77 characters of verbatim text, just like the java.awt.Label in Figure 4-6.)

Figure 4-6. A JLabel and a java.awt.Label displaying the same text

As of SDK 1.4.1 the following components ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596004087Errata Page