Pros and Cons of html-output for statistical data
Why not do both ? Make your data available as CSV (for simple export to scripts etc.) and provide a decorated HTML version.
At some stage you may want (say) a proper Excel sheet, a PDF etc. So I would enforce a separation of the data generation from the rendering. Make your generator return a structure that can be consumed by an abstract renderer, and your concrete implementations would present CSV, PDF, HTML etc.
I am using Python3 to calculate some statistics from language corpora. Until now I was exporting the results in a csv-file or directly on the shell. A few days ago I started learning how to output the data to html-tables. I must say I really like it, it deals perfect height/width of cell and unicodes and you can apply color to different values. although I think there are some problem when dealing with large data or tables.
Anyway, my question is, I'mot not sure if I should continue in this direction and output the results to html. Can someone with experience in this field help me with some pros and cons of using html as output?