Re: 'Form Builder'

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 10:39 AM, Lester Caine <lester@lsces.co.uk> wrote: > > > So is there something I've missed that may be worth considering even at > this stage of things? > I'm in the minority, but I tend to craft DSL's to maintain flexibility for use cases such as HTML forms. For example, I've coded a recursive descent parser implemented with a Parsing Expression Grammar (PEG.) The short overview is that I embed a DSL for forms directly in my HTML files: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Example page with embedded DSL</title> </head> <body> <h1>Example page with embedded DSL</h1> <!--qform:o--> - method post text - name name - maxlength 30 - required email - name email textarea - name my-message submit - value Send message <!--qform:c--> </body> <html> Then, I have a preprocessor that parses my directory of files and outputs the form code in whatever format I need across the entire project: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Example page with embedded DSL</title> </head> <body> <h1>Example page with embedded DSL</h1> <form method="post"> <div class="form-group"> <label for="name">Name</label> <input type="text" name="name" maxlength="30" required="required" id="name" /> </div> <div class="form-group"> <label for="email">Email</label> <input type="email" name="email" id="email" /> </div> <div class="form-group"> <label for="my-message">My-message</label> <textarea name="my-message" id="my-message"></textarea> </div> <div class="form-group"> <input type="submit" name="field4" id="field4" value="Send message" /> </div> </form> </body> <html> The value for me is two-fold: - I only enter the minimum information required to declare my forms. - Updating the forms sitewide or across multiple projects (updating to new version of bootstrap, changing HTML implementation, etc.) merely requires making changes in one location in the parser. You can see an example implementation of this approach in Go at my Github account: https://github.com/AdamJonR/polyglot Now, to be clear, this is not a solution embraced by the masses. However, after using this approach for a couple years, I love it and don't plan on using anything else. Adam