HTML Editor synchronicity

Recently, a friend of mine needed to write a simple "readme" type HTML document, and asked me if I knew of any good free, basic HTML editors. I poked around on the web and found several, but they mostly just seemed like overkill for a simple job. Then it hit me - we all have 80% of a basic HTML editor already installed on our machines. IE has had HTML editing support for a while. All you need is a basic host that wraps up the web browser control in editing mode.

As tends to happen with most of my ideas, I figured 200 other people must have had this same idea ages ago. So someone must have already written it already, right? I posted a question to the off-topic list, and got back lots of great pointers to sample source code for hosting the web browser in editing mode. Many of the samples included "host" applications, but they were...um...unrefined. So I started writing my own. The sample code did most of the heavy-lifting around interfacing with the control. I figured between that and DotNetMagic, a nice little WinForms host would be pretty easy to scrape together. I started experimenting. I even started coming up with terribly clever names like BackPage or FreePage.

Then, lo and behold, Lutz Roeder beat me to it.

http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=ee974084-d5c2-44d5-a11b-b2efb96074f8

Very cool.

I still like BackPage though.