How to generate proper HTML and formatted RTF-contents?

HCL Domino Domino Forum
1

Hi there!!!

This is really a confusing problem!

Has anybody at IBM/Lotus really thought in-depth about displaying web-pages and RTF?

If you set:

“form-properties”

"propellerhead-tab"

  "On WebAccess"

    to "Notes"

there are DOCTYPE, html, head and body tags generated automatically. RTFs containing text-formatting, like bold or italic, are displayed properly in a web browser.

Very good, so far!!!

If you set:

“form-properties”

"propellerhead-tab"

  "On WebAccess"

    to "HTML"

there are no tags created automatically and no RTF-formatting is applied.

Bad!!! Because …

… if you are:

  • working with pass-thru-HTML with interspersed computed-text or computed-for-display-fields

and don´t

  • want to write complicated and messy-looking @-formulas into the “HTML Head Content” and “HTML Body Attributes” form-events to generate JavaScript, CSS-Includes, Meta-Information or thelike,

how do you get the RTFs rendered? If you set the option(above) in “form-properties” to Notes you are unable to write your own <!DOCTYPE ... definition or -tags because you get 'em double ;-((((

Has anybody who has the same problem (and i bet there are many of you who have) found any solution to this problem or are we damned to use websphere???

Greetings and thanx in advance

Rolf Krueger

2

Subject: How to generate proper HTML and formatted RTF-contents?

Rolf, I don’t have an answer for you but I’m very interested in what you find out. We have hundreds of Notes databases containing thousands of document for the past 7 years - all of which look great in Notes. We’d like to present them equally well over the web. We’re beginning to investigate CSS but we’re having trouble because we’re not web gurus.

3

Subject: How to generate proper HTML and formatted RTF-contents?

I don’t think there are any really good answers. In ND6, you can at least set the http header info, and that resolves a bit of your problem, but not enough. We have a third party product called the Midas Rich Text LSX which can also help solve part of the problem by generating HTML from rich text and documents with a great deal more control, but it is also only a partial answer, as you have to generate the HTML and push it out as opposed to simply letting the document render using Domino. Still, if you would like to give it a try and see if it would help, I’d be happy to assist you in evaluating it.