“html makes it so easy to write forms that look like crap”
- Jamis Buck of 37signals
For some reason I’ve been thinking about that idea a lot this weekend. The 37signals post which made this comment pointed out Wufoo, a site that let’s you create nice looking html forms for collecting all sorts of user information. The site is also a testament to usability and just looks damn nice (see some screenshots here). None the less, it’s still not what I, as a programmer, needs as it’s a hosted solution for non-tech people. I could really use a Wufoo that spits out some rails templates (preferably in haml) which I can just slap into my project. I find myself making html forms far too often, repeating way too much work, and spending too much time on css details. I need something clean, cross browser compliant, and preferably with some client side validation.
Wuhoo actually provides a good start with this. Their templates page (which has some great color palettes) actually gives you a static form with some standard items (like radio items, date boxes, address boxes, etc) along with css and javascript to make it look quite nice. There’s still work to be done if to hook it into your project, but it’s a start. I also came across this post which shows how to use css to do all sorts of horizontal and vertical layouts from a plain html form. I feel like mixing these two things together and adding some jquery form validators (and convert it to haml) could be pretty handy.
Seems the kind of thing I’d do if I was consulting full time (or maybe the kind of thing I’d do starting around June).