20 October 2006
An Online WYSIWYG Form Editor
Today, I was reading a highly dugg article in Smashing Magazine called List of CSS Tools. It was an interesting collection of links for design and building web applications. But one link in particular stood out: JotForm. This is the kind of designer Fortitude needs. In one of Fortitude’s predeccesors, I had built a designer which gave you a 400×400 pixel canvas to drag elements on to. They were represented by div entities, showing just a name and an outline to indicate dimensions. And it only supported three form control types:
- Label
- Textbox
- Select
It’s easy to get bogged down in details. Each new control exponentially complicated the code. I concluded checkboxes and option buttons inconcievable under that framework. But JotForm has given me new hope.
Right off the bat, it is obvious that it doesn’t try to be Visual Studio. Visual Studio is almost certainly the best IDE designer in existance. ASP.net’s forms are a delight, which is one reason that Fortitude Form’s code looks somewhat similar to ASP.net’s ASPX files. But it does offer a palette of controls. It doesn’t allow free-form layout. But it does have control over ordering, automatic labels and so forth.
It seems like JotForms is a very handy RAD environment for designing HTML forms. But with just a few added formfield properties, it would become an excellent first-generation front end to Fortitude Forms.