Add support for serializing newforms to HTML

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@…>]

Currently, newforms only serializes to suit W3C's often-criticized Guidelines for serving XHTML 1.0 as text/html to buggy user agents. Its markup is not conformant with the HTML 4.01 specification, because according to HTML's SGML definition <input /> means <input>&gt; not <input>. My patch leaves the status quo as the default, but facilitates producing conformant HTML by adding an optional argument to the serialization methods. as_p(forms.SERIALIZATION_HTML401) for example. If there's a better way to achieve the same thing, that would be good too. It would also be nice to be able to set SERIALIZATION_DEFAULT app-wide, but I'm not sure how that's done. It may be that an end_empty_element() function would be useful elsewhere in Django too.

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@…>]

A couple fixes to my patch

[Chris Beaven]

Benjamin - you need to add your serializations package to SVN and create a new patch.

[Armin Ronacher]

A big +1 for that. I would love to see HTML compatible forms in django.

[treborhudson@…]

Yes! Please! I avoid newforms b/c it outputs XHTML. It's trivial and anal, I know, but for us who think XHTML is "broken", please include this in Django!

[Jacob]

We can't possibly include all the myriad ways someone might want to represent a form (XForms, anyone?). The as_* methods are shortcuts; nothing more. I'd consider an approach using a template filter here (i.e. {{ form|to_html }}).