Prebuild Marketo form in custom HTML?

[Anonymous]

     Not sure if anyone else is having this problem. I'm wondering if it would be possible to prebuild a form using client side HTML markup, and then hook in the Marketo validation and form cookie. I'm trying to avoid the momentary roundtripping / flash that the form does when using the default embed code. I would like the visitor to be presented the form, prebuilt, but then use the Marketo Forms API to submit using the form.

Has anyone tackled/posted about this before?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

First, please move this question to Products​.  "Community" is for feedback about the Marketo Nation website itself -- and yes, this is confusing.

Anyway, can you do what you're describing? Yes. You can Make a Marketo Form Submission in the background using any custom form.  But using this method for a form that's an exact replica of a Marketo-generated form doesn't make much sense. All you'll be doing is disconnecting yourself from Form Editor changes. Instead, if you want to speed rendering, you can run your forms through a CDN and cache them for, say, a day at the edge.  Or hide the body content until the form is ready: compare this and this.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for the direction, Sanford. My initial question has been answered, and the discussion moved over to Products.

I think the best option for us is to cache the forms for speed sake. Thank you again, Sanford!

[Robb_Barrett]

Unless she wants to get fancy and put in her own form of progressive profiling or customize the displayed fields / labels based on known attributes. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

But the form won't actually work as expected without the forms library behind it, so you might as well build it completely from scratch if it's only going to look (partially) like it does in Form Editor.