In a recent post on my Bitsplitting blog, I complained that Apple’s forbiddance of web views on Apple TV would limit many developers who use HTML tastefully in the construction of their interfaces. I suggested that Apple might allow developers to use web views, but limit their usefulness as full-fledged web browsers.

Since writing that article, I discovered a potentially useful “backdoor” of sorts that could allow developers to continue using HTML to some extent for visual formatting of content in their user interfaces.

UITextView supports attributed strings, and NSAttributedString supports being initialized with HTML. Historically on the Mac at least, this capability was famously poor, but I seem to recall reading that it had been boosted at some point by using WebKit behind the scenes to do a more proper conversion.

Here’s an example of how an Apple TV app can convert literal HTML content into a visual form. This is, so far as I can tell, compliant with both the letter and the spirit of Apple’s guidelines for using the SDK:

NSString* staticHTMLContent = @"<div style='font-size:6em;'><strong>Hello</strong> <span style='font-family:courier;'>there</span>, I'm <span style='color:red;'>HTML</span>!</div>";

NSAttributedString* myHTMLString = [[NSAttributedString alloc] initWithData:[staticHTMLContent dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding] options:@{NSDocumentTypeDocumentAttribute : NSHTMLTextDocumentType} documentAttributes:nil error:nil];

[self.textView setAttributedText:myHTMLString];

This example code is run from a UIViewController whose self.textView is an IBOutlet to a UITextView in the user interface. And here’s how it looks in the Apple TV simulator:

Granted, this is a far cry from a fully-functional web view. I’m sure it won’t serve the needs of all developers who currently rely upon UIWebView or WKWebView, but I expect that in some cases it will be a valuable workaround to the otherwise total omission of support for rendering HTML on Apple TV.