Thursday 2011-11-10

We're in audit-mode at work which means generating-documentation-mode. Naturally, we don't want to generate docs this year, and have to regenerate by hand next year.

The auditors will accept flat-text, which rocks; however, I also want to be able to use the documentation as internal sales docs, so they have to be at least a little bit pretty.

It turns out that embedding CSS and Javascript into one HTML file makes for a nice portable documentation package that you can ship. Either hack the reporting service to output JSON or not, wrap the output into a script tag, and use JS to embed the data structures into the CSS-pretty page.

Add the libraries needed to take care of the CSS/JS interop issues and the resultant files have roughly the same attachment weight as M$ or libreoffice products. All while being readable in my text editor. And automatically generated each month.