Edit a text locally

[Chaim]

I am developing a math game that is compiled into an e-book which then uses the IE browser. Is there a way for the user to edit and/or enter examples from a file in his local machine.

[djr33]

Can you provide a link to the page in question?
Is this page only local?
Are you using a "website" as a "document" instead?
Where should the data be stored? Local machine? Server?
Saving it to the server means you need PHP or another server side language. Saving it to the user's machine if no server is available will be very difficult.
Since you are using (only) IE, you could try ActiveX, if you are willing to have the user get a security warning and need to lower the security settings, and only ever use IE.

[Chaim]

I am using the page only locally. I am not sure what you mean by "Are you using a "website" as a "document" instead?" The program is complied from my html code into an ebook with a compiler called Maestro Pro. I would like the data stored on the users machine. I know it is difficult but is it at all possible?

[djr33]

This really has nothing to do with html, then. You are using Maestro Pro to generate something-- "ebook" is a title-- what format is it then?

Is it still just html? If so, possibly there could be ways of doing this. You could embed a Java applet or maybe use Flash (harder to save files, but maybe a little easier than Java to start using and more people have it already installed). In theory you could store limited amounts of data in cookies, but they are very unreliable because they can easily be deleted and will not be saved forever (often just the length of a single "session").
ActiveX is the "best" option in some sense, but this requires the use of internet explorer (only!) and will also require lowered security restrictions. If this is a "trained" user, then you can explain this to them and tell them not to use any other browsers. If this is for wide distribution, that would be messy. Assuming you can use ActiveX, then this is definitely something you can do using "javascript" (ActiveX).

If it is generating another format, then it entirely depends on the format-- if it's an exe, then sure. If it's a pdf, then no way at all.


"website" vs "document"-- the question was whether you were looking for an active "website" or just something that was possibly outside a browser. I'm still not sure what format you're working with. If html is compiled*, then that changes things entirely-- it probably isn't html any more in a strict sense.

(*I'm not sure this is the right word-- "compiling" is a process of taking code and creating a standalone program that can run. Since html is just markup (style, formatting, content), it's not really possible to compile it in the sense that you could with Java, C++ or another language like that. Of course if you just mean the real-world sense of "compile" as in "gather", then that's different as well.)

[Chaim]

I found an interesting solution here.

http://codingforums.com/showthread.php?t=181561

I am writing the program in html. However, it will only used on a local machine independent of the Web.