Is there a HTML wrapper in Cocoa other then UIWebView?

Question

I have a bunch of texts and images (taken from the content tag of a RSS feed item) that I want to display in my app. I've managed to extract them from the entire content tag with some regular expressions. But the thing is, in order for the texts to appear before all the images are loaded, I need to preload all the images, and even more, I need to reposition all the texts/images when an image is loaded, because I don't know their size at first, to position the element under them correctly.

I realized this is too much hard-work for such a simple task.

I searched for some simple HTML wrapper but I found nothing. And than I realized: hey, I can insert HTML directly into an UIWebView. But then again, I see UIWebView more like an iFrame in HTML, and by that I mean not a very flexible/fluid element. The content will be bigger than the iPhone screen height, can the UIWebView adjust to fit it's contents? I don't want the browser zoom features and all, but rather to blend in the page.

So bottom line: In order to display a bunch of texts combined with images, should I continue with my initial pain-in-the-ass method, should I use a UIWebView, or is there another simple element like the one in my dreams? :)

Thanks.

Answer 1

...[S]hould I continue with my initial pain-in-the-ass method, should I use a UIWebView, or is there another simple element like the one in my dreams...

I'm not entirely sure what you have against UIWebView, it's a decent and fairly complex element that can support many behaviors. One of the extremely attractive properties of IB and Cocoa development is that prototyping is very quick. I think you should spend half an hour and play around with the component. Writing your own code is definitely an option, but layout engines (ie WebKit in UIWebView/Safari, or Gecko in Firefox) is a complicated task. Why reinvent the wheel?

HTH.

Answer 2

Definitely use the web view; it has hundreds of person-years of work behind it, and is realistically impossible for you to reproduce by yourself. To keep it from zooming, you can add a viewport meta tag to your HTML fragment.