On the recommendation from Dries and some prodding from Jeremy I decided that maybe I should post something regarding some work I did a few months ago.

Drupal is amazing with how it's able to provide information about its runtime and environment even though PHP has little of the functionality to provide it. Specifically the Forms API layer allows you to programmatically access all the "metadata" related to any form.

$form = array();
$form['form_id'] = 'system_site_information_settings';
$form_state = array('storage' => NULL, 'submitted' => FALSE);