Re: crystal reports as html

Hi Julian/All

> we use Crystal Reports to present info on a web site linking to the rpt file
> and letting it generate the HTML. Problem is that the mark-up is shocking;
> we have several graphs in the reports and afaik there is no way to add an
> alt attribute to the image of the graph in the HTML page. Can anyone help
> please - pointers, advice etc would be so greatly appreciated.

This is a common problem; try saving a Microsoft Office document as HTML 
and you'll see what I mean... (Forgive me if I'm out of date - I haven't 
worked with Microsoft software for a couple of years - last I saw was 
Office 97.)

Although the writers of what are specifically Web authoring tools (as 
opposed to applications which are just able to write HTML) are hopefully 
changing their products to produce good, accessible markup, I don't 
forsee that many of the writers of other applications rushing to do this 
unless they are already producing accessibility products.

So, where does that leave us?  In need of tools to tidy up the poor 
markup that we are being presented with.  There are various applications 
around to do this (e.g. HTML Tidy), but filling in missing ALT 
properties may be a little much to expect from them.  It would not be 
too hard to write something in Perl that could find all IMG elements in 
a document and add ALT properties, but where we would get the values to 
fill in, I wouldn't like to say without seeing some sample code.

If, for example, each graph were preceeded by a Hn header element of 
some kind (where n=1 .. 6), it would be possible to extract the content 
of that element and insert it into the ALT property of the IMG element.

To summarise: there are tools available to tidy-up markup, but inserting 
missing properties would probably require programming.  Maybe a word 
with the developers of Crystal Reports wouldn't go amiss...

Hope this helps.

Cheers

M

-- 
Matthew Smith
IT Consultant - KBC, South Australia

Received on Tuesday, 21 January 2003 17:26:07 UTC