Alan Bell: Progress Integrating Gecko Renderer Into Notes Mail

Frustrated by rendering issues with HTML in Notes mail? Head over to Alan Bell's blog. A few months ago Alan published an article describing how to integrate the Gecko rendering engine into the Notes client so that URLs clicked within Notes could effectively be rendered with Mozilla (the equivalent to using "Notes with Internet Explorer" as your browser setting in your location document). Now Alan has gone a step further.

Because MIME mail encoded as HTML is not a fully compliant HTML page, the Notes client does its own rendering instead of turning the job over to a real browser, and that's why there are occasional (but persistent!) rendering problems in Notes mail. So, Alan has gone and figured out how to get Notes to feed the HTML into a file and then feed that into the Gecko rendering component. This is very, very cool. There are still some rough edges, which Alan describes, and possibly some additional ones that are as of yet undiscovered, but it is very, very promising.

I want to also say that in the event that anyone from IBM is reading this, it's pretty obvious that Alan's technique would work with the IE component as well, and with that being the case I'd be very surprised if something very much like Alan's approach hasn't already been tried by IBM engineers. If that's the case, then the fact that it's never been released as a product feature suggests that there could have been performance, stability, or security issues that kept it out. Given that IE is the only component that IBM supports, security is a prime suspect, but if IBM has knowledge of performance or stability issues that can't be overcome with this approach, I hope that they'll be willing to share that info with Alan.