[Feature]: Need a form designer or possibly example HTML forms to present to players and GMs via MapTool to manipulate MapTool token data

[adventuremagic123]

Feature Request

Is this pie in the sky? Maybe, but here's the problem.

Foundry VTT and Roll20 are killing me with their sexy HTML forms. Players are very attracted to it. As a single developer, it's hard to keep up with that.

So, here's a suggestion that might make the MapTool community much more able to compete with that in possibly a doable way. We need to make creating these HTML forms easier and faster.

We need one of the following:

1. A form designer to create HTML forms that can modify MapTool token data. Probably, the output from the form designer would have to be modified by framework developers. Work by framework developers should be minimized as much as possible. The data fields will many times need to have either simple (such as a range of numbers like 3 to 18) or complex (such as based on a list of selectable items). If there's a way to help us plug all that stuff together, that would be a big help.

OR

2. Provide numerous examples as part of the MapTool install package with the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS needed to make a variety of these situations work. Provide best practices MTScript to use those examples.

If there was a way to develop an easy to use form designer tool, that would be the nicest way -- perhaps using some sort of markup language where a string could be provided by a framework's macros as a parameter to a MapTool macro to display and execute the form.

There's some urgency in providing this feature. For the short-term, it might be good to do #2 and provide #1 later as an epic user story, if it is possible and there's available man power.

The Solution you'd like

Something that makes building HTML or HTML-like forms for data entry much easier and faster to provide nice looking forms like are available, for example, from the PF1e game system on Foundry VTT.

Alternatives that you've considered.

Redeveloping my UI to use HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. Problem is the amount of time to do that and complexity of the project. I think this complexity is preventing the MapTool community from producing frameworks that can compete with Foundry VTT game systems.

However, you should notice that my PF1e data importer (used to import tokens from Hero Lab in MapTool) works much better than the importer available for Foundry VTT doing the same. Why? I used a better approach. My importer works with reliable and predictable XML data -- theirs works with unpredictable text data provided by different sources (so it breaks easily).

So, the Foundry VTT community does NOT necessarily have to dominate what the MapTool community can do with less resources. We just have to be smarter and more efficient.

Additional Context

No response

[adventuremagic123]

BTW, I provided that image from Paizo for the fire beetle under the fair use part of copyright law. The MapTool community provides indirect benefits and support to all of the RPG publishers by building communities of players and GMs who buy their products to use MapTool.