This is great. One more reason to love gmail. I don't think I have to explain anything. Picture tells the story:
Forms are one of the very common requirement, especially if you are dealing with any government body. With aspiration towards automation, everybody seems to be moving towards PDF Forms which you can print but doesn't let you save soft copy of it. On my current project at Headspring, we came across such requirement. System under development deals with multiple organizational bodies. Part of the integration effort needed submitting forms which are in predefined format. Most of the information that needed to be filled in has already been captured by the system. Hence in order to reduce manual work burden...
Some level of Reporting is very much integral to any web application now a days. Traditionally we have been writing special html page to achieve this result. This page is specially formatted to fit reporting requirements (like printer friendly view) which is achieved by mean of CSS magic. There is nothing wrong with the approach except the fact that it violates DRY [Hey, isn’t same content available in some other html page as well which is not suitable for direct printing??] The violation of DRY comes with it’s own technical debt. Now every time you have some change...