I-View Offline Web Browser Cudahy WI

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Originally published at Internet.com

I-View is a small offline Web browser designed primarily for royalty-free distribution of HTML files. The premise is simple - in order for your customers and clients without Web access to view HTML documents, they are going to need a Web browser that can supports offline Web browsing.

I-View efficiently satisfies this need by allowing you to pay a one-time price for I-View, rather than having to pay every time you send out a copy of the browser. The small footprint of I-View helps the browser compete against the likes of Internet Explorer and Netscape in the offline browser market, but ultimately I-View's cost and lack of advanced features keep it from being a viable solution for most

An Offline Browser

As an offline browser, I-View can only view local documents (Talent Communications has also released a 16-bit online Web browser, I-Comm, for viewing documents on the Web), but it does offer an extensive selection of features for the purpose.

Features offered by I-View include support for tables, background images and sounds, interlaced and/or animated GIFs, image maps (server side only), frames, style sheets, center and other advanced HTML 3.2 tags, printing capabilities, and a built-in WAV player.

Missing features in both the standard and pro editions of I-View relative to the competition include support for HTML 4.0, Dynamic HTML, Java, JavaScript, ActiveX, advanced tables, and additional IE/Netscape tags (sub/superscript and div tags, for example).

I-View Pro

Talent has also recently released a professional version of I-View designed to give advanced Web authors the ability to customize the I-View browser. In addition to the regular version, I-View Pro offers support for Win-CGI (enables the use of the standard Win-CGI 1.1 interface to extend the capability of I-View browser - i.e. add forms, etc.) as well as a built-in HTML file search engine.

While a single copy of I-View Pro costs the same as the regular version ($29.95), purchasing a royalty-free license costs quite a bit more ($1,295 as opposed to $395 for the regular release). Users who have already purchased the standard edition can upgrade for $999.

Summary

For its purpose, I-View will impress many users, especially those with continual distribution needs, but there is a relatively stiff price to be paid for I-View. While the cost for a single-user copy of I-View is just $29.95, royalty-free licenses will set you back quite a bit more - the standard license is $395.