Reputation: 76663

How to render HTML element without using web browser?

Is there a way how to draw specific HTML element content on a canvas without using any web browser control ?

With this code I'm rendering the element to the form's canvas (just as an example).
It works though, but this code is not a good practice - see below, why...

uses
  SHDocVw, MSHTML;

procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
var
  WebBrowser: TWebBrowser;
  HTMLElement: IHTMLElement;
  HTMLRenderer: IHTMLElementRender;
begin
  WebBrowser := TWebBrowser.Create(nil);
  try
    WebBrowser.ParentWindow := Application.Handle;
    WebBrowser.Navigate('https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2975586/good-delphi-blogs');

    while WebBrowser.ReadyState < READYSTATE_COMPLETE do
      Application.ProcessMessages;

    HTMLElement := (WebBrowser.Document as IHTMLDocument3).getElementById('question');
    HTMLRenderer := (HTMLElement as IHTMLElementRender);
    HTMLRenderer.DrawToDC(Canvas.Handle);

  finally
    HTMLElement := nil;
    HTMLRenderer := nil;
    WebBrowser.Free;
  end;
end;

It's bad because

it uses the hidden TWebBrowser control, but I would like to load the HTML document directly through the IHTMLDocument interface and render certain element on my own canvas
if I create and load the IHTMLDocument manually e.g. this way then the renderer method IHTMLElementRender.DrawToDC doesn't paint anything (maybe because there's no canvas for rendering of the document)
even worse is that IHTMLElementRender.DrawToDC is deprecated at this time, so I'm looking for an alternative method for rendering elements on my own canvas

Is there a clean way to solve this using MSHTML ?

Upvotes: 15