This package represents an experimental approach to improving the way Django outputs form widgets. At the moment, widgets created using django.forms are outputted as XHTML (with self closing /> tags) even if the rest of your site uses HTML. This package solves this problem by introducing three new template tags: {% doctype %}, {% field %} and {% slash %}.
To install, place the django_html directory somewhere on your python path, then add django_html to INSTALLED_APPS in your settings.py file.
See the following thread on django-developers for further background information:
http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thread/thread/5f3694b8a19fb9a1/
The doctype tag does two things: it outputs the relevant doctype and it stores your chosen doctype in context._doctype. Example usage:
{% load html %}{% doctype "html4" %}
This will output:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
It will also set the context's doctype to "html4". Other template tags can then take that in to account when deciding how they should render.
If you just want to set the doctype without outputting it to the page you can use the optional "silent" argument:
{% doctype "html4" silent %}
The field tag allows you to output django.forms widgets taking the current active doctype in to account. Django outputs XHTML form widgets by default but this may not be appropriate if your site uses HTML 4. Here's how you output a form widget with stock Django:
<label for="id_name">Name:</label> {{ form.name }}
This will always output as XHTML. Here's how you use the new {% field %} tag:
<label for="id_name">Name:</label> {% field form.name %}
Now the current doctype (as set using the {% doctype %} tag) will be used to decide if XHTML self-closing tags should be used by the widget.
The field tag also lets you specify extra HTML attributes for a form field from within your template (useful for adding things like extra classes without having to modify the form definition in your Python code):
<label for="id_name">Name:</label> {% field form.name class="myclass" %}
With an HTML doctype, this will render as:
<input type="text" name="name" id="id_name" class="myclass">
If your doctype is XHTML, you will get:
<input type="text" name="name" id="id_name" class="myclass" />
This tag is included for completeness. Authors of reusable apps which ship with their own templates (extending base.html) might want to ensure that their apps use the correct markup for the current doctype. In practise, this means outputting a self-closing tag for a small number of HTML elements. The {% slash %} tag simply outputs the string " /" for an XHTML doctype and renders blank for an HTML doctype. Here are some examples:
<br{% slash %}>
<img src="/site/logo.png" alt="My site"{% slash %}>