FWIW, there have been some discussions about forms in FW lately. I got
this from Adobe. http://direct.adobe.com/v?xlHWlWJEcqqlnvJq They
claim they can make your life with forms easier. So, this may be of
some interest to some others here, but Adobe 9 Pro is probably way to
expensive for any casual use.
LLE
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That’s nice, but it’s Acrobat, not a Web form at all. I think what people are trying to do here is find the “Freeway of CGI” or something. Forms To Go is a nice stab at that, and many people here find it to be a worthwhile investment.
I suppose that what happens is this: Freeway smoothes out so much of the design and production of a Web site, and users expect it to do the same with the server-side stuff, too. But unlike HTML, with its rigidly controlled specifications (sorry, “recommendations”) by the W3C, there is a wild west of competing technologies and versions of same on the server side.
Freeway could very easily make a handler script to go with every form. And it would work, and do what it says on the tin, on at least one server – maybe lots of servers. But then there would be the support issues of “my hosting provider won’t upgrade to a compatible version of XYZ, how can I re-write this handler to make it work anyway?”
I believe that Softpress has “picked its battles” very carefully with not going into this side of the business. How many 30 - 50-message threads have you seen on this forum about Tim Plumb’s incredibly well-written PHP Feedback Form Action? Yes, it works very well for many people, and Tim works very hard to keep it up to date for the shifting landscape of PHP, but for some users there is this essential understanding gap that they simply cannot bridge, and for them, the product fails.
I’ve pondered this problem from time to time, trying to think up a way to make an Action or Action + server module that would make this pain point go away. It’s decidedly not easy – everybody has their own idea what a form should look like and what should happen after you press Submit. Catering to those different approaches and needs are the hard part of the problem from my perspective. The server part pales by comparison (but never really goes away either).
Walter
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