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Show HN: Formie – an open source (WIP) form website made with pure HTML/JS/CSS (github.com)

17 points by div72 ↗ HN
Hey HN,

First time submitter here.

After a FOSS related interaction required me to use Google Forms 9 months, I wondered on why no such FOSS tool existed and decided to build it myself. I aimed the site to be for people like me, so no telemetry and minimal JS was the goal. I know this is rather small and incomplete compared to other projects but I've thought you folk might be interested.

Not sure if it breaks the pure part, but the site also uses Flask.

If you're lucky, you might find the app alive at: https://formie.div72.xyz.

17 comments

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chrisma0
"pure HTML/CSS/JS" sounds great, but then there is no demo hosted directly on GitHub pages? Form submission could just go nowhere.

I would love to get a quick taste of what you think makes this special.

div72
Bottom of the post: https://formie.div72.xyz/forms/

What makes it special for me is that it's simple, open source and does not track you. (and the lots of bugs hiding I suppose)

thrownaway561
ahhhh... no, it's made with python so it's not pure.

nice try dude but you couldn't host this on a static server. you edit your title as it is a bit deceitful.

div72
I've semi-thought about that and edited the post but wish I actually edited the title instead(the option is gone now). I was thinking of pure as in no React etc., did not think that this could be interpreted in that way initially.
lynndotpy
I would also be surprised by something described as "pure HTML/JS/CSS" being built with Flask. My first question was, "How are answers stored?"~

Still, thank you for sharing!

div72
I suppose something like WebTorrent could be used in that instance? The peers could eliminate the need for the server.

Still that's too much JS for my minimal/no-JS goals.

btdmaster
How much does WebTorrent depend on the specific server doing work through WebRTC rather than any other peer?
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marcosdumay
Hum... Did you expect it not to use a database either?

The title is very confusing until you realize it's the frontend that is "pure" (AKA, no framework). But not deceitful, as there is no way to make that in a pure static server, the deceiving interpretation is actually absurd.

thrownaway561
doesn't matter. if you are going to say something is pure, then it better be pure. not on me that the author used a clickbait title and got caught.
encryptluks2
I really wish GitHub/GitLab/CloudFlare would have added some sort of form functionality to their Pages feature.
naet
I usually add forms to static sites using cloud functions.
[dead] mmh0000
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zzo38computer
Will CSV be implemented? (e.g. you can import the CSV into SQLite in order to make your own queries on the data) Making the results as CSV should be better than making the results as HTML, in my opinion.

(I had also made up my own format for making forms of a similar purpose, which is purely plain text and no HTML or anything else like that is needed (although it could be converted to HTML, or print out, or whatever other format you might want to use, but the basic format is plain text and can be distributed as it is). I made the specification although the implementation is not yet complete at this time.)

div72
Yes, that is on my mind. I was actually planning on letting the user do some queries as the form data is actually stored in a sqlite database anyways.

Can you link to your format if it's public? I'm interested.

zzo38computer
> I was actually planning on letting the user do some queries as the form data is actually stored in a sqlite database anyways.

That can work, but you should also allow downloading the SQLite database or the CSV, in case you want to do it on your own computer.

> Can you link to your format if it's public? I'm interested.

http://sprunge.us/Suua5t I will intend that my implementation will also be able to store results in a SQLite database.