Beginning with Oracle8 i Database Release 2 (Version 8.1.6), you can use SQL*Plus to generate HTML pages. Instead of spooling a report to a printer, you can write it to an HTML file for viewing on your corporate intranet. With a bit of creativity and some cascading style sheet (CSS) skills, you can generate some good-looking web pages. In this chapter, I'll revisit some of the character-based reports from Chapter 5 and show some ways to render those same reports as HTML pages.
CSS is a mechanism for specifying the format of an HTML document. One reason CSS works well for SQL*Plus-generated HTML is because your CSS styles can reside in a file separate from the spool file generated by SQL*Plus, greatly reducing the likelihood that you will need to modify your SQL*Plus script to effect formatting changes. To learn more about CSS, read Eric Meyer's Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly) and Eric Meyer on CSS (New Riders).