Web Form Converter errors & warnings

Panorama X
1

I found the Web Form Converter. Very cool. I will admit to having seen this before a decade or so ago and played with it then too. I think MySpace was a very hot thing at the time.

I do not like bugs or warnings and was not happy to see hundreds of them. Fortunately, I found the Advanced Options and the Font Substitution panel which quickly resolved my most common warning.

[WARNING] đŸ”„ ".AppleSystemUIFont" is not a recommended web font (Object ID:000155).

Perhaps this might be added to the standard font substitutions as I am sure many others will have this error these days.

My next warning was not so easily solved. For some reason, this one would not go away like the above font issue did. Is this something unique about the resolution for this one?

[WARNING] đŸ”„ "#SystemBoldFont" is not a recommended web font (Object ID:000155).

Lastly, I got the following error.

[WARNING] đŸ”„ Diagonal lines cannot be converted to HTML (Object ID: 000037).

I must admit that I’ve always found it odd that the Line Object always defaults to a diagonal line as I use maybe 1 diagonal line for every horizontal or vertical line on my forms. And I had thought that I had managed to make them all horizontal or vertical, but apparently not. No one has ever cared or noticed before and it has always printed great. Now that someone cares, is there an easy way to just ‘make them all straight’? I could go through and manually do this but finding that last line might be tough. It would be nice if there was a preference to automatically snap lines to the closest 10° or x° or such (lest the Option key was involved.)

2

I do not like warnings

It is simply warning you that your Panorama form does not map correctly to the capabilities of a web browser. I assume that you would prefer warnings to assist you to simply a silent failure.

not a recommended web font

The Web Form Converter only works with fonts that were available as built in browser fonts circa 2005. It does not do substitution. If a font isn’t on this short list, it won’t work.

  • Arial
  • Arial Black
  • Charcoal
  • Chicago
  • Comic Sans MS
  • Courier
  • Courier New
  • Gadget
  • Geneva
  • Georgia
  • Helvetica
  • Impact
  • Lucida Console
  • Lucida Grande
  • Lucida Sans Unicode
  • Monaco
  • MS Sans Serif
  • MS Serif
  • Palatino Linotype
  • Palatino
  • Tahoma
  • Times
  • Times New Roman
  • Trebuchet MS
  • Symbol
  • Verdana
  • Windings

Note that it was never imagined that the Web Form Converter could be used to take existing forms and convert them for the web. The idea was that it would allow you to use the Panorama graphic tools you are familiar with to make new forms specifically designed for web use. It sort of barely met that goal in 2005, when the web was much simpler. It absolutely is not a suitable tool for that purpose in 2025. You’ve made a couple of suggestions for possible improvements, but it is not possible to improve it in a way that makes it anything other than a toy. It is not suitable for generating professional quality web pages, and as long as it relies on Panorama’s graphic editing tools as the starting point, it never will be suitable. It is not “very cool”. (Also, “many others” will not encounter the same errors you are encountering because literally no one else is even attempting to use this feature.)

In my previous post I said that I didn’t recommend using the Web Form Converter, I was dead serious about that. To clarify that point, this tool is provided “as-is”. I do not intend to make any changes to it. In my opinion, making marginal improvements to this tool would be the equivalent of applying touch up paint to a car with a blown piston. Pointless.

However, though I’m not going to make any further changes to this code, it’s always possible for someone else to do it. The full source code is available in _FormLib:MAKEWEBFORMWEBTEMPLATE. It’s only about 600 lines of code, so not that complicated.

3

Great info. Always wonderful to hear accurate reality, whatever that is.

When I said ‘I do not like warnings.’ what I meant was my OCD works to have zero bugs, warnings, or issues left to be done. I put in the effort to resolve whatever ‘warnings’ exist as I want things smooth, and the best possible.

You were correct in my assumption that the Web Form Converter was going to do an automatic conversion of the non web fonts. I presumed that a simple line of code would assist all of today’s programmers from having to do the conversion from Apple’s default font today, into an appropriate web font. I’ll take that on if it can not do the conversion that may be necessary.

I hear your thoughts that the Web Form Converter is a blown piston but I’ll offer the opposite opinion (as agreed with by many others) in that the CRUD web page construction that Panorama can do is perhaps the most important item that will keep Panorama X alive.

Panorama was designed back in the days that small businesses maintained their own databases and we programmers could make Panorama dance and sing and do anything the business could imagine. It was a wonderful life. Today, those same businesses expect to be able to do all of their ‘work’ remotely and locally via a browser. My clients are not looking for web sites. They are looking for web pages. They could not care less about responsive pages. They just need to remotely C R U & D their data. If Panorama can not do that for them, they would be just fine with paying some company $20-50@ month for a web service that someone has designed and is on the web. That solution will never be exactly what they want but it will be tremendously cheaper than me with my ultimate perfect solution. This is exactly why I have fewer and fewer clients.

Unless I can give them CRUD, EVERY SINGLE ONE of my clients is going to disappear. Everyone of them. We are no longer in 2005 when the web was a bonus. Today being on the web is the most important point for people. The world has changed. In 2005, 7 digits was a phone number. Today, you must have 10 digits for it to be a phone number. Many youth wouldn’t even remember when 7 digits was enough. (I noticed this when duplicating some of the examples in the Help file and saw that the Denver Hotels only had 7 digits. I laughed and HAD to resurrect the example with today’s data by adding the area code. (You too may want to update that.) Otherwise, I would be the odd one.)

I am extremely fortunate and satisfied that the WFC exists as is, because without it, I will disappoint my clients. With it, I will continue to amaze them with all of what I can deliver. And they will be happy.

Please do reconsider your position as a poll of Panorama users would show that having CRUD alone, will be an expectation from any business that has data that must be acquired, & managed. It ‘kind of’ moves Panorama to the tablet and phone which is a expectation that we must meet.

4

You are linking the ability to implement a CRUD application with the Web Form Converter. That’s a false linkage. The Web Form Converter is a method for setting up the arrangement of items on a web page, i.e. the layout. That’s completely independent of the logic needed for a CRUD application. You can implement a CRUD application using any type of layout mechanism you want - plain HTML, Bootstrap, Tailwind, React, Foundation, etc. Ultimately it’s all just text, and Panorama is excellent at manipulating text. It doesn’t care what the text means.

It ‘kind of’ moves Panorama to the tablet and phone which is a expectation that we must meet.

You stated that you don’t care about responsive web pages, then you talk about implementing mobile friendly web pages. Mobile applications are the entire reason why responsive web design was created.

Back in 2005-2006 when the original Web Form Converter was created, all web pages were designed for the desktop. In that environment, it was not unreasonable to create web pages with a fixed layout, which is what apps like PageMill and the Web Form Converter did. Then in 2008 the iPhone came out, and within a couple of years the entire web design world was turned on its head. It wasn’t long before all web development was mobile first responsive design, and fixed layout tools like the Web Form Converter became completely obsolete. There is no way to square this circle - no one can build a system that takes a fixed arrangement layout like a Panorama form and automatically turn it into a responsive layout. That’s like perpetual motion - it cannot be done.

Now, it’s true that building responsive web pages is quite a bit more work than building a fixed arrangement web page with a tool like the Web Form Converter, and takes a lot more knowledge. However, that’s just the price of admission these days. There has been a huge amount of work in the industry over the past couple of decades trying to build tools to assist with this, including projects like React, Tailwind, Foundation, Bootstrap and many more. But as far as I know, no one has developed a magic “easy 123” system to automate this process. That’s why you see so many courses, tutorials, boot camps and Youtube videos intended teach you how to become a front end web developer.

without it, I will disappoint my clients

I guarantee you, if you present your clients with a non-responsive, non-mobile ready web page in 2025 almost all of them are going to be severely disappointed.

The Web Form Converter was an attempt in 2005 to allow Panorama developers to create dynamic web pages without having to become knowledgeable web developers. In 2005 that was somewhat possible. In 2025 it is not. You’ll need extensive knowledge of both Panorama coding and web technologies to build the kind of dynamic solutions that today’s market requires. Hey - that’s why your customers need you! If that wasn’t true, they would just build these systems themselves. But rest assured - with that knowledge, you can deliver whatever kind of system your customer’s require. You can pair the Panorama Server backend with whatever your front-end web technology of choice is. But in 2025, ProVUE is not going to provide the front-end web technology, and I have no intention of making a Sisyphean attempt to re-invent that gigantic complicated wheel.

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