> All kidding aside, I've been playing with going from a database to HTML and
> the conversion programs suck. Not so much do to the programs themselves,
> but the fact that HTML is basically a crude mark-up language. and lacks the
> power to do the kind of layouts you can do with program code in a database
> report package.
Most of the so called html generator programs, and conversion programs are
lacking. You usually have to write the html code yourself if you want to
solve more complex problems. Also, html is not really intended to be a
programing language. What you need to do is make use of CGI to pass
queries from your web pages to the database and format the results of your
database output back into html. You should be able to use the language(s)
of your choice to create the CGI program, but PERL seems to be the one
most commonly used for this purpose.
That lab environment monitor I mentioned earlier was written in Visual
Basic. It controlled a Digital Voltmeter to measure signals from various
sensors around my lab (the resistance of a platinum resistance thermometer
for instance), compute various parameters, create graphs as gif images,
and write its output as an html file. You simply need to write the html
file in the directory where the web server expects to find it, and the web
server takes care of the rest. Don't know if this will give you any ideas
or not.
> The PDF reader is available for free from Adobe and all the new browsers
> wil link it up if you have it installed, and it's quite amazing. Adobe is
> working on release 4.0 and you can bet that it will support hyperlinks in a
> much more sophisticated way than it does now.
True, but pdf to the best of my knowledge is really designed for the
creation of on-line manuals and books. It is very useful for taking
papers and documents that you have written using a word processor, and
making them available to the web without requiring everyone to have the
same word processor as you. I believe that a pdf file is fundamentally a
postscript file to which the font library has been added, and subsequently
compressed. This solves the problem of postscript files looking different
when printed on systems with varying font libraries. It really isn't a
database system, and in this case, I don't believe really adds any more
capability than what you already have with an html document.
This is getting WAY off topic for this list. There are many sources of
information for creation of web pages available. I rather doubt that the
rest of the altphoto list wants to know how this is built. They'd
probably just rather be able to use it when it is done.
- Wayde
(wallen@boulder.nist.gov)