Introduction

Programs known as "browsers" read this language and determine how to format the display of the content of the page based on these HTML markup codes or "tags". The most common place to see browsers in action is as a way to view information on the World Wide Web.

InfoCourier extends this idea by allowing you to combine a powerful browser with HTML and any referenced graphics into a stand-alone .EXE file that you can use to:-

• give to people on a disk.
  
  • the compiled file has an overhead of around 530K
  • you can get an awful lot of pages plus a lot of graphics on a single floppy
  • you can reduce its size by about 200K by zipping it
  • no additional files apart from the distributed .exe are required
• distribute electronically via a BBS or FTP site.
  
  • or via E-mail or a Web page or.......
  • have on a server on your network
  • or.....
• have published on a CD attached to a magazine.
  
  • or given away at trade shows
  • or attached to some other merchandise for promotional purposes
  • or.....

The possibilities are endless! We've come up with a few simple ideas on our ideas page, but there are probably thousands more.

Of course if you already have a Web site you can reuse a lot of the investment you have expended in creating the pages. They probably won't be ideally formatted for compiled distribution, but they will be close.

Note that it is the particular browser's decision how to display different parts of a document, and it will base that decision on a number of factors including the characteristics of the hardware it is executing on, the user's preferences, and the size of the display area it has (usually a user can resize the browser's "window"). Bear this in mind, because it is not always easy or possible to "micro-manage" the exact representation the user sees, that is against the basic idea of a markup language.