Re: When will the IBM i community adopt HTML for reporting?

[Booth Martin <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As an experiment a few years ago, I set up an Intranet on the i, with a 
couple of directories, and with a simple home page, featuring the 
company's logo.  There was a menu of reports with an option on 
time-sensitive reports to refresh the data.  Adding a .css file made the 
actual .html very straight forward and easy to do in RPG.

The users were happy to use it, especially in that the fonts and 
graphics gave them nicer output when they did hit the print button.

However the users response really was a resounding nothing.  Which, with 
the benefit of hind sight makes perfect sense.


On 1/21/2015 3:20 PM, Nathan Andelin wrote:
> With all the travails that developers seem to go through to implement
> overlays and advanced function printing, it makes me wonder how long before
> shops might move to HTML for reporting?
>
> In other words, one might generate HTML stream files from RPG programs and
> "spool" them to IFS directories rather than sending spool files to output
> queues.
>
> One might transform HTML stream files into PDFs for meeting precise
> printing requirements.
>
> There seems to be a preference for using traditional print and spool
> functions instead, but why?