March 2025 flutter_html Maintenance Update 🚀

[Sub6Resources]

tl;dr:

• flutter_html is getting back up and running this month
• The master branch is going to be a bit messy as we merge in old fixes, get up to date with the latest Flutter/Dart features, and release 3.0.0.
• Future maintenance is still uncertain; consider a donation to help support my time on this project. Thanks!

Hi all, project creator and maintainer @Sub6Resources here.

I'm deeply sorry that the package has been left unmaintained for so long (for an explanation, see #1396).

flutter_html (according to pub.dev) still consistently has over 100,000 weekly downloads. That's a lot for something that hasn't been maintained in nearly 2 years! My time, unfortunately, is still quite limited -- I'm still a broke college student with a family to support. However, thanks to a few one-time donations, I can justify taking a few hours off my regular job to work on this project throughout this month.

My last commit was in June of 2023, and both Flutter and Dart have gone through quite a few changes since then. As such, this month I'll be entirely playing catch-up and clean-up. Here are my March 2025 priorities (in roughly the order I hope to tackle them):

• Merge in fix: Better support for intrinsics, table, vertical-align, and display #1306 which fixes a few major bugs in the existing 3.0.0 version.
• Make flutter_html compatible with the latest Flutter and dependency versions.
• Fix any major 3.0.0 bugs (i.e. bugs that cause the package to not compile, crash, or otherwise completely fail).
• Move from CircleCI to Github Actions (everything is just easier when it's all in the same place)
• Fix any low-hanging 3.0.0 regressions (i.e. regressions in behavior from 2.2.1 --> 3.0.0 that are easy to fix or that would cause a significant change or bug in the behavior of often-used html elements)
• Publish 3.0.0 so we can finally move away from the existing 2.2.1 release (which is almost 3.5 yrs old!!).
• Start evaluating existing PRs and issue reports (any that are specific to 2.2.1 can probably just be closed)

Just a warning, the master branch may get a bit messy from time-to-time this month as I make updates to the existing code. Since the master branch is already broken on the latest Flutter version, I don't foresee this being an issue.

It's likely the initial 3.0.0 release will still have some bugs. I feel justified in releasing it anyways since it is still a major improvement over the 2.2.1 version (which doesn't even compile on any recent Flutter version). You can still use the old versions if you experience any issues, and there are also plenty of forks that will be unaffected.

Thank you again to those who have donated! While I'm able to commit some time this month to flutter_html thanks to their support, future maintenance is still uncertain without any funding to justify my time. If you'd like to help, consider making a recurring or one-time donation from yourself or your company. This project will always be MIT-licensed and free to use.